Since the pandemic, Laura Jane Grace's solo career has become less of a side quest than a main adventure. In the first two years of this decade, the Against Me! frontwoman pulled two stellar releases from her sleeve - 2020's 'Stay Alive' and 2021's 'At War With The Silverfish' EP - with no prior warning.
Listening to the next record in that sequence, it hardly feels like an accident that Grace has moved from a body of work with black-and-white sleeve to one where colour explodes against greyscale. Though it was also conceived in the pandemic, 'Hole In My Head' is brighter, more immediate and richer in variety than what has come before it.
Hole In My Head coverart
Its earliest songs take on multiple identities at once - the choppy title track dances happily on the line between punk mayhem and film soundtrack cool, while the gloriously retro blues-rock number I'm Not A Cop is both vicious and fun.
The campfire punk-rock of Dysphoria Hoodie, meanwhile, returns to the acoustic palette that Grace has become more comfortable in, and the faintly country Cuffing Season shares a similar warmth as she dismantles the walls around her heart brick by brick. "I wanna let myself feel the whole of you / And maybe you'll let yourself feel it too," she sings.
While its back third is slightly less arresting than the rest of the album, Grace frequently finds a way to quickly tug the listener back in with a witty turn of phrase - special mention goes to Hard Feelings' "Oh mother mother mother I've ruined my brain / With alcohol, weed, porn and cocaine.". Brimming, as ever, with ideas and charisma, 'Hole In My Head' makes Grace's run of solo records a hat-trick of successes.
