Madi Diaz spends much of her fifth album, History of a Feeling, spent and screaming, in the throes of a breakup, ready to take up the mantle of your messiest friend. The Nashville-based songwriter is crying on the M train, kicking down her ex’s door, and refusing to let the past go. In her own words, she is “not really looking to get healthy,” and at her angriest, as on opener “Rage,” she has no care for eloquence whatsoever: “Forgive and forget/Fuck you, fuck that.” Never mind the high road: The narrator of these songs is totaled on the low road, a smoking wreck a few miles south of the nearest pit stop.
After a handful of emotionally nondescript early records, History of a Feeling breaks through to a spare, unvarnished, and occasionally volatile style of indie rock that feels in step with the newly sharpened edge to her lyricism. Although inspired by a uniquely chaotic time in its creator’s life—the album chronicles Diaz’s breakup with a partner who also began transitioning around the same time—History of a Feeling is really a record sharply focused on the self, the ways we respond to stress and pain and the passing of time. The breakup acts more as a way for Diaz to map her own emotional landscape: the way she can be cruel and kind in the same breath, her tendency to oscillate from petulant and puerile to mature and measured, her ability to slip from romantically lovelorn to platonically devoted. It’s the rare record that captures how visceral it can feel to work through, and truly understand, your own feelings.
After dropping out of the Berklee College of Music, Diaz spent the better part of the last 15 years in Nashville and Los Angeles, working as a writer and session musician. With credits on records by Kesha, Elle King, and Bleached, among others, Diaz has the resume of an industry lifer: The vast majority of her work, aside from her four prior solo records, has been for soundtracks and commercials, working on material used in everything from Lucifer to Love Island. But where pedigreed songwriters have a tendency to turn out solo records that are mealy, mushy, or just generally overcooked, on History of a Feeling, Diaz steps away from the conventions of hired-gun songwriting with ease.
Her songs often succeed because of how little is done to them. Every single song on History of a Feeling is driven by a strong, indelible vocal melody memorable and polished enough to sit on a far more commercial record. Rather than toning down her natural affinity for melody, Diaz and producer Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver) pull everything else back. The vocal melody is often the only moving part in these songs. On “Man in Me,” Diaz’s clarion voice—a titanium box lined with velvet—takes the song to the rafters with just dissonant guitars and gently arpeggiating piano. It’s a song about trying to work through perceived deception, though it’s not played as a tearjerker because Diaz is smart enough to know that the song, and its inhabitants, deserve something more complicated.