On her first full-length album, Meth stitches together a threadbare quilt of heartbreak, yearning, desire and shame.

There’s an old saying that everyone you meet along the way will affect your life. Whether incrementally or unexpectedly, whether they are antagonists or protagonists, whether they stick around or drift away, each person you meet is another twitch on the thread of your journey. For Sarah Meth, this concept embodies her debut album ‘Something Shameful’ (released via her imprint, Wishbone). Drawing on lived experience, fantasy and distant memory, ‘Something Shameful’ collides romance, heartbreak, desire, and shame, all twisted up in a wry, satirical sense of humour. Her debut is a patchwork collage in both the characters that influence her stories and in the recording process itself. Put together through a mix of Meth’s characteristic home mixing with help from 4AD studio engineer Fabian Prynn and Sorry’s Louis O’Bryen, ‘Something Shameful’ is born from a unique and intimate collaboration. Sarah Meth’s debut turns the quotidian on its head, conjures lullabies for the isolated and builds a world overcome by yearning, longing and eventual reconciliation.

The impetus behind ‘Something Shameful’ stemmed from a fateful trip Meth took to New York in 2024. After finishing a support tour with King Krule, she found herself adrift in the streets of a city she barely knew. During her week-long stay, she encountered a string of characters who would leave a lasting mark on her life. This renewed sense of selfhood and immersion crystallises in the album’s titular opener. Meth’s mournful acoustic melody drifts beneath her plea to “be reminded not to be broken, blinded”. As the song builds towards the chorus, her vocals intensify, soaring over her growing self-awareness: “I needed to breathe it. I needed to believe it.” Though the song explores the emptiness of a non-committed relationship, Meth reaffirms her identity: she yearns and mourns, yet emerges changed and transformed. This radical candour splits open across ‘Something Shameful’, particularly in the track ‘Don’t touch me you’re my hero’. Self-assured in her desires, Meth’s “patience and persistence” run dry as she declares how sick she is of “collecting things for the story”. With its backing MIDI-synth, the track conjures an uncanny whimsy – a restlessness and excitement at the prospect of being wanted. Yet, as it concludes, Meth’s softer refrain, “don’t touch me, you’re my hero”, shatters the playful illusion. After all her time waiting and yearning, she has overindulged the fantasy. What remains is a lauded hero, untouchable and unobtainable.

Imbued with open-wound lyricism, ‘Something Shameful’ encapsulates the complexities of being in your 20s. Tracks like ‘He’s not my baby, he’s nepo’s’ and ‘Lonely World Girl’ dispel the fantasies of dejected lovers, fragmented through Meth’s reflective storytelling. The latter draws to the heart of these harsh realities. Switching between the first and third person, Meth’s heartbreaking experiences are transformed into parables – warnings against being the “lonely world girl”. The gentle acoustic ostinato and atmospheric electric notes structure the song as a comforting slow dance. Yet Meth’s despondency at the “empty love between my thighs” and “all the mornings I have wasted” reveals a crueller truth – the boy all the “beautiful women think they love” is not worth loving at all.

Alongside the poignancy of Meth’s storytelling, ‘Something Shameful’ revels in its experimentation with genre and sound. The crashing cymbals and distant bass notes of ‘I gave you a shell (because I felt like one)’ invoke a mystical scenery where her pleasure remains “sacred in the back of my mind”. In ‘Fun’, her wide array of samples, pitch-shifts, and synths embraces the disorienting deception of the song’s namesake. Pitching down the line “fun” into this horror-esque taunt, Meth slips into the absurd and uncertain space you occupy when pleasing someone overshadows your own pleasure, where fun becomes detrimental, manipulated and abused. As much as her lyrics recount these difficult histories, her experimentation with sound also becomes a method to explore the intricacies of her heart. On the album’s penultimate track, ‘Sonic’, this exploratory attitude is most present. Meth’s initial dreamy vocals and gentle acoustic are swiftly distorted and blown apart. Perhaps the album’s heaviest track, with gritty electric guitar and drums, ‘Sonic’ materialises Meth’s erupting longing and anguish – forever plagued by the bass-octave vocals: “We could be sonic.”

‘Something Shameful’ muses on the universal feelings of discomfort, heartbreak, passion and loss, especially in tracks like ‘Sorry I’ve been busy’ and ‘Cheek’. But Meth does not leave us stewing in our dejection. The album’s closer, ‘Horses’, is a playful yet piercing reflection on heartbreak. Recalling relationships past, Meth recognises the futility of love’s comfort. Centred around an ethereal synth melody and lines like “I’ll kiss bye that city each time I have to go”, Meth guides us gently through the turmoil and out the other side. As much as ‘Horses’ resonates with the broken-hearted, it’s also a path to acceptance; like wild horses, love is inherently untameable. Why should we expect it to be otherwise?