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If laughter is the best medicine, is sarcasm a close second? Rachel Cribby, whose debut album is cheekily titled ‘I Can’t Wait To Forget This Later’ thinks so. The Canadian songwriter’s sharp, often sardonic lyrical style is for more than listener’s amusement; it’s her healing method of choice. And in recent years, she’s needed one. Cribby lost her father in 2022, and left her beloved Montreal. 

“It’s not like my twenties weren’t tumultuous,” shares Cribby. “I had plenty to sing about. I was dumped more than I can count and maybe did a bit of dumping myself. But something has happened to me in my thirties, where all of the big life stuff that I thought I could ignore by moving away, by trying to become a completely independent and self-assured person, smacked me in the face. And then it promptly started to eat me alive.” 

Cribby journeyed to Halifax, her late father’s hometown, to record her first full-length. “It was my own kind of pilgrimage,” she says. She worked with producer Daniel Ledwell (Jenn Grant, Oh Pep!, Ken Yates) to transform her mourning—over her father’s death, over accumulating clashes in romance, over a biological disposition to anxiety—into something she could more easily carry. The resulting songs sparkle with early aughts alt-pop appeal. Her brisk melodies are driving and wiry, precise with their punches, and, oddly enough, funny. “Sometimes life is so hard it’s laughable,” she says.

Just be yourself / What awful advice, Cribby moans on “Mind Like A Sieve,” a song whose misty, sparse arrangement is made all the more arresting by her self-aware sense of irony. Give me your worst / I'm sure it’ll help / I read that ‘you don’t have empty / Hands when you come back from hell.’  It’s ominous and intimate, like sitting on the bedroom floor of a friend who’s suffering. She turns self-deprecation into a portal, transporting listeners directly into her own mind and mood. 

That mood flares red hot on lead single “Rich Boy Luck,” a zipping and incisive assessment of a young love’s implosion. Rich boys never know what they want / What’s there to get when all the getting’s been got? / Rich boys don’t know anything about luck. “Have you ever seen that meme that’s like, ‘who is the worst person you’ve ever met and why was it the guy you dated when you were 19?’” says Cribby. “That’s what this song is about!” It’s a warm wash of relatable rage, her lyrics just vindictive enough before emotional intelligence—perhaps involuntarily—takes hold. You opened your mouth and said shit you don’t know / You were not ready / You were not ready.

On “I’ve Got Pain,” Cribby illuminates the effect of epigenetics—the study of how behaviors and environment can cause changes in the way one’s genes function—on her own life. Her vocal performance, condensed in tin can fashion and occasionally spoken, recalls early career Jenny Lewis, that nonsensical blend of brooding and bright that causes a heart to twitch. I’ve got pain from the 1960s / If it had been me it would have killed me / But you lived and you felt everything. Cribby oscillates between compassion and indignance toward her predecessors, sparing no nuance in her acute understanding of generational trauma. I’ve got pain from 2020 / I’m a betting woman, so I’ll say history repeats / But next time I’ll be more ready / Because of all I carry with me.

In spite of her playful relationship with pessimism, Cribby’s vision for the future isn’t bleak. She has fallen in love, a relationship born against odds across the US-Canadian border, fostered by phone calls and binoculars. “For much of the beginning of my relationship with my now husband, the border was closed because of the pandemic,” she shares. “The process of immigrating to be with him was horrible. I’m a very impatient person and for me, the only thing worse than waiting, is waiting without any timeline or information.” She’s bottled some of that frustration to listeners’ benefit in “Half a Life / A Whole Year.” I don’t want to go to your wedding, she wails. I don’t want to go to your shower / I don’t want to see pictures of your baby. It’s deliciously bitter, humorous and healing for its bold, if shameless, honesty. 

“All of my favorite songwriters have mastered the dizzying duality of funny-sad,” says Cribby. “Take Stephen Merrit of the Magnetic Fields—in the same breath, he’ll declare his heart too broken to ever recover, and make a bilingual joke about having an unanesthetized appendectomy. I’m not saying I’ve reached that level of brilliance, but there are some morbid jokes in there for people who care to find them.”

Cribby’s ability to weave personal struggle with global crisis lends her songs the weight of a wake-up call, as on “OMG,” a song encapsulating the breadth of modern anxiety—politics, jobs, climate—over a buoyant guitar and bobbling synth. I thought I’d have a house / I thought I’d have a farm / Thought I could outrun poverty / On all fours, my legs and my arms. The same applies to album closer “Last Night, I Dreamt,” an off-kilter lullaby populated by images of a US government in disarray. I’m so tired, she repeats throughout, seeming to yank down the curtain on her poetic comedy. Beneath the tricks and puzzles and dark jokes of Cribby’s mind, is a woman’s heart—still beating—as best it can. 

‘I Can’t Wait To Forget This Later’ will be released November 20 on First City Artists.

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label: maddie@firstcityartists.com