Written by Rebecca Ackerman
Sasha Alex Sloan shares her next single, ‘New Normal,’ in anticipation of her forthcoming sophomore album, I Blame The World, out May 13.
‘New Normal’ is a melancholy song about adjusting to life without someone. Sloan’s melodic vocals drive the song and match the emotion she’s trying to convey. She tells of all the things she always used to do with an old partner like going for drives in the afternoon or having drinks at their favorite place and how she’s now doing all these things alone.
New normal is a phrase I think we all became familiar with during the height of the ongoing pandemic. The idea of trying to adjust to something and grow around it because it’s likely we’ll never go back to the way things were. That same idea is applied here in ‘New Normal.’ Sloan understands that there’s no point in trying to go back to how she was before this person. She has new favorite spots and new routines that she can’t stop doing because they’ve become part of who she is.
The void that she now has to fill isn’t one that comes easily. Even as she’s trying to move on, she still waits for phone calls and viscerally reacts to her old partner’s name. The song ends abruptly with one guitar strum and two beats that sound like drums. It makes it seem like the end of this old relationship was just as abrupt as the end of the song, and now that the song is over, we all have to move on.
Favorite Lyric: “Go for a drive like we always did in the middle of the afternoon”
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