There’s an exhaustion that settles in when everything starts to feel disposable—especially music. A dozen new albums every Friday, a thousand songs a day, all optimized for the next skip. So when a band like Bad Self Portraits comes along and asks you to slow down—to sit with pain, to trace it through the grooves of a record—it feels jarring. And necessary.
Their debut LP, I Think I’m Going to Hell, isn’t background music. It’s a slow burn through religious anxiety, tangled family dynamics, and mental illness, delivered with startling specificity. Frontwoman Ingrid Howell draws from her own experience growing up in a strict church environment with undiagnosed OCD, and the title of the album itself is taken from an actual thought she carried with her since childhood.
The songs are lived-in, sometimes heavy, but never weighed down. “Pensive” stands out for its generosity—an exploration of difference within a relationship that doesn’t seek to resolve tension, just to understand it.
Musically, the band spans the quiet and the loud with equal confidence. Jesse White’s drums are all texture and restraint when needed, then explode without warning. Guitars swell and sputter. It’s not flashy, but it’s never dull.
One of the most compelling aspects of this release is how it’s being put into the world. Rather than dropping straight to streaming, I Think I’m Going to Hell arrives first as a vinyl exclusive on August 26 through Buy Before You Stream, a Midtopia-backed initiative aimed at giving power (and profit) back to artists.
There’s something radical about asking listeners to engage with an album as a complete work again. Buy Before You Stream is part of that shift. No algorithm is going to serve you a record like this. You have to seek it out.
And it’s worth it. Bad Self Portraits have crafted something that doesn’t apologize for its emotional weight. It demands patience and rewards it.
https://buybeforeyoustream.com
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61553825550403
https://www.instagram.com/buybeforeyoustream
https://www.badselfportraits.com
https://www.instagram.com/badselfportraitsband
https://www.facebook.com/badselfportraits
