Back in February we wrote about A Little Hello by Cincinnati’s Mol Sullivan, a release on Ruination Record Co. which acted “as both an introduction (hence the title) and a purging of the past, allowing Sullivan to finally let go of songs she has crafted during difficult moments in the last ten years.” The majority of the songs were “written during a struggle with alcoholism and the subsequent slow painful passage to sobriety.” Early next year, Sullivan will return with GOOSE, a debut full-length which picks up from this point and brings us further down the line, however circuitous and difficult a path it proved to be.
“Why’s it gotta be so hard?” asks the fitting refrain of first single ‘Eggshells’, though the question refers to more than personal struggle. Namely, the process of maintaining relationships through difficulties and dramas, offering enough of oneself without succumbing to emotional injury too. Mol Sullivan broaches the subject with unerring honesty, but also a certain humour, appropriate for a situation that means so much yet is marked by a certain absurdity.
Now Mol Sullivan has returned with ‘Still Tryin’, the album’s opening track and the one which grounds its themes. The first song written after the break-up which would eventually precipitate an effort towards sobriety, it uses a hushed, bruised style to welcome the listener into a raw period of life. But there’s a glimmer of something else too, a newfound freedom to move towards some better future. Set deep in those early days of a new beginning where everything feels possible yet tenuous and a little too vivid to bear. “It is a song that I still feel very deeply about, even some six years since I initially wrote it,” Sullivan describes. “It gives me hope.”
GOOSE is out on the 26th January 2024 and you can pre-order it from the Mol Sullivan Bandcamp page.
