It’s rare for an album to make me laugh out loud during the opening seconds, but Diet Cig’s first full-length, Swear I’m Good at This, did exactly that. Singer Alex Luciano tells a story about dating a boy also named Alex. “It was... weeeird,” she sings, recounting the awful sensation of calling out your own name during sex. The rest of Swear is just as goofy and giddy, creating the effect of a close group of friends sharing funny, gossipy, sometimes dirty stories at a party. The music, made with Luciano’s guitar and Noah Bowman’s drums, is loud but low-key, with twee, major-chord melodies (“Link in Bio,” “Tummy Ache”) presented cleanly and directly, given only just the slightest bit of punk-rock spit-slime.
Diet Cig released their debut EP Over Easy in 2015 and have constantly toured the country ever since, but for many, the first impression of the New Paltz/Brooklyn duo came from Pitchfork’s review for Swear I’m Good at This. In a hectoring essay, the writer dictated a set of prescriptions for all feminist-leaning indie pop bands to be contained within, and found Diet Cig wanting. In between confusing jabs at the band’s origin story and a side-snipe at Etsy stores selling “Black Lives Matter” patches, the piece said, “Diet Cig are the heavy-handed musical equivalent of the pussy hat: a well-meaning feminist gesture that lacks all nuance.”
In the end, Pitchfork’s review seemed more interested in putting up barriers to the perfumed garden of social awareness—“see how woke we are?”—than in advancing progressive issues. But what’s more puzzling is why Diet Cig, specifically, were selected to be a referendum on these issues at all. Yes, it needs to be acknowledged that the pussy hat is a symbol with limitations, particularly its exclusion of members of the transgender community. But it also functioned, quite remarkably, as shorthand for a national statement of protest. If a band has the potential ability to communicate as widely and as directly as that, they must be doing something right. And if Diet Cig are that band, it’s because the beauty of their songs lies in their simplicity and their concision.
We seem to have entered a period where all social art is—at least initially—valued based on its level of political consciousness. There are positives and negatives to this, of course, all of which should be plainly obvious. But what Diet Cig does to me, for better or worse, is make me briefly forget about this particularly difficult moment in time, reminding me of the shouty, sing-along pop and rock songs I loved as a teenager, and through my 20s, and even last year and last week. Make no mistake: There’s liberation in music like this. And while it’s not the end of the world if some choose not to share in it, it’s a shame they’re trying to shackle it, too.
