Caroline Polachek – Starburned and Unkissed
Don’t worry, readers — we didn’t forget about you! This week we’ll be covering a couple of your favorite tracks from 2024, plus one more new(ish) song! First up, Claire Davidson with the Caroline redux…

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Claire Davidson: I can’t decide whether the at-times-bizarre lyrics of “Starburned and Unkissed” are an intentional reflection of the uncanniness that characterizes I Saw the TV Glow, the film for which it was written, or just the result of Caroline Polachek’s florid poetry having gone without a necessary edit. For all of her odd imagery, though, Polachek sure knows how to write a hook, and her desperate cries cut through the song’s bursts of guitar with enough emotion to make her words resonate on an intuitive level, if not a literal one. Even that eccentricity produces one devastating refrain: Polachek’s comparison of her heart to a phantom limb captures the pain of searching for intimacy with such aplomb that it justifies the entire song’s existence. It’s a shame, then, that the final chorus ends so abruptly, before its sense of tragedy can settle with the listener.
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Melody Esme: I Saw the TV Glow is a film about transcendence–how terrifying it is, but also how essential it is if you don’t want to spend your life in the state of a constant panic attack. Panic attacks sent me down the path of discovery that led to my realizing I was a trans woman, so the film, and the final scene especially, resonated on a deep level. “Starburned and Unkissed,” in turn, sounds transcendent. But that’s almost too dramatic for what the song truly feels like: relief. It evokes the feeling of weight falling off your shoulders, of remembering to take deep breaths and drink enough water — the sensation of estrogen entering a body that didn’t even know how badly it needed it and the realization that the fog you’ve existed in doesn’t need to be there forever. You can find peace of mind and be the person you were meant to be. And it’s not an intense journey to somewhere new — it’s home, where you belong. Stepping inside for the first time doesn’t feel strange or alien because you’ve always known on some level that it was there, waiting for you. “Come home,” Polachek beckons, as A. G. Cook’s synths entangle you in their web of love and protection. And once you’re there, they let you know you can stay forever if you want to.
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Grace Robins-Somerville: The first couple times I listened to this song, I thought there was a different vocalist on the second verse and harmonizing on the chorus. Perhaps that just speaks to the elasticity of Caroline Polachek’s voice. It might’ve been kinda cool to get somebody else on it for a duet — I’m imagining someone like Ethel Cain or Samia or Weyes Blood. Still, this and “Claw Machine” are probably my favorites on the ISTTG soundtrack, which is saying a lot because I adore that soundtrack and could see it becoming super foundational to some kid’s music taste, in the way that the soundtracks from movies like Juno and Adventureland were to mine when I was in middle school. Also, if Caroline Polachek writes a song where the title includes a compound word that she made up, odds are I’ll be into it.
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Julian Axelrod: Respectfully, Jane Schoenbrun should have given I Saw the TV Glow‘s mid-movie performance slot to Caroline Polachek instead of Phoebe Bridgers and Sloppy Jane. My girl CP has a better look, more screen presence, and a better soundtrack song. (Also, it’s worth noting that my theatre’s audience had a bigger reaction to Conner O’Malley than Phoebe Bridgers. Who has more face recognition: Caroline, Phoebe or Conner? Sound off in the comments!) “Claw Machine” literally opens with the line “I saw the TV glow,” but “Starburned and Unkissed” feels truer to the movie’s vibe: visceral yet ethereal, hopeful yet tormented, starburned yet unkissed.
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Alfred Soto: Emilia Perez used crap songs for color and did nothing to illuminate how a person transitions; I Saw the TV Glow used non-diegetic quasi-pop songs as accompaniment — as a glow, if you like. The chorus lands as flat as the power chords, but at least Caroline Polachek recorded music that the film’s protagonists might’ve dug.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The flange-y power chords on the chorus hint at the potential of Polachek’s impending jock jam era, but everything else is a bit undercooked; perhaps it’s the off-album-cycle timing, but we’ve covered her twice in the past month-or-so on threadbare material. She’s one of our moment’s most skillful vocalists, but she’s playing with her food here. Paired against A.G. Cook in classic rock mode (his least successful guise), she relaxes into a virtuoso’s slouch — gorgeous but never moving, lacking the more playful touches of her work with Chairlift, as Ramona Lisa, or on Pang.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Caroline Polachek leaving the artpop of Pang and Desire, I Want to Turn Into You behind to make the soft-rockier “Starburned and Unkissed” reminds me of Nina Gordon leaving Veruca Salt and making the substantially soft-rockier Tonight and the Rest of My Life. The analogy is imperfect in several ways. Gordon’s move toward pop-rock meant she rocked less, but Polachek’s move toward pop-rock makes her rock more — maybe more than ever. Polachek’s songwriting is far more oblique than Gordon’s, and remains so here. And Gordon’s album, as her solo debut, established her as a new artist with a new sound; Polachek went solo years ago, and this soundtrack single might just be a side stint and not a permanent reinvention. But my reaction to both pivots is exactly the same: pleasant, but less interesting.
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Leah Isobel: In general, I find Caroline’s solo work a mostly insufferable, juvenile, and shallow platform for image-building. She has no musical curiosity and nothing to say in her music that can only be said in her music. This shallowness explains why she works as a pop artist — pop music is shallow — but where great pop inhabits shallowness so thoroughly that it transmutes into divine presence, Caroline can only approach pop from the oblique, distant angle of a 2000s blog darling. “Look at me,” her music says, “I’m making silly pop songs. But I am an artist! Isn’t that crazy?” In her understanding of pop, songs are deprioritized, as if all you need to become a pop singer are the right reference points. This makes her full-length albums kitschy and cloying, her promotional campaigns corny and exhausting. And yet, hater as I am, I actually find “Starburned and Unkissed”… kinda bearable?
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Taylor Alatorre: I like songs about male loneliness — female loneliness, too. I recoil from tweets and longform articles about “loneliness epidemics” of any gender, whether from a feminist or fascist or Third Way centrist lens. This isn’t because the problems don’t exist, but because the opiners tend to flatten lives and circumstances into brusque bullet points, as if the right narrative shift or policy toolkit would reduce nights spent staring up at ceiling fans by 58%. “Starburned and Unkissed,” despite its purported grunge pedigree, is fully invested in feeling out the messy contours of modern loneliness, in ways both that are both sympathetic and alluringly opaque. “Digital sand” is the crude scene-setter, but “come home, the kettle’s whistling” is the establishing moment, panning out to reveal the abyssal gap between aimless meme-sharing sessions and a seemingly unattainable domestic fantasy. Polachek’s teenage narrator is unsure if they even want that fantasy, but it’s these headlong leaps between barely formed desires that are captured so well in this queasy coming-of-age portrait. The guitar overdrive of ’90s alternative is compressed into a “deep-fried” artifact — not a new technique, but one which aptly illustrates the concept of emotional distortion, of not knowing whether one’s feelings aren’t just copied from some script they overheard once. “Hey, you Casanova” is also this sort of trial-and-error posturing, but it’s only a brief respite from the high school social death outlined in the title, such a source of shame that the thought is left uncompleted at the song’s end.
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Ian Mathers: I have listened to “Starburned and Unkissed” plenty of times separate from I Saw the TV Glow, and I just love it as a song all on its own. As an actual ’90s kid, there’s a moment or two here where the production yanked me back to my teen years, but that’s not sufficient to explain my love for it. (As for “grunge,” the connection is mainly in its commitment to the classically unsubtle quiet/loud/quiet structure, where you know exactly where it’s going to hit, just accomplished here via different tools.) Still, it is true that every time I listen to this I think back to one of the most emotionally overwhelming movie theatre experiences I’ve had in the past decade, so feel free to assign 10% or even 20% of the score here to the music supervisor et al.
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Jonathan Bradley: Claire Danes gazing through a fishtank. This radiates.
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Nortey Dowuona: Don’t lie awake in your grave, please. Climb out. This world still needs you.
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Lol Leah really hates her.