Bnny

There are one million ways to approach love, one million ways to experience love, one million ways in which love shapes both the course of our lives and how we choose to navigate that course. On her second album, Bnny’s Jessica Viscius looks love square in its many eyes and describes, with self-awareness and humor, not only what she sees, but what it makes her feel. Deep romantic love, breathy lust, generous self-love—and their opposites, self-loathing, resentment, disappointment—all make appearances on One Million Love Songs, Bnny’s revelatory second album.

Bnny’s debut, Everything, was written in the face of tragedy, following the death of Viscius’ partner, fellow Chicago musician Trey Gruber. It was a raw, honest album whose songs seemed to emanate from Viscius like a personal climate. Pitchfork called Everything “a beautiful record from wall to wall, comfort food for heartbroken insomniacs.” And while those songs have not lost an ounce of their power, performing them every night live across the US and Europe made for a new and different kind of exhaustion. It’s hard to access your grief all the time; it’s even harder to share it. “I wanted to make songs that are exciting to play—songs that make me feel happy,” Viscius says. “This album is about love after loss, getting older, and just trying to have fun with a broken heart.”

True to form, One Million Love Songs is a brighter, fuller record that shows Viscius’ immense growth as an arranger and artist. “Good Stuff” begins as soft slowcore, with a touch of Echo and the Bunnymen, but as it wakes up, Viscius channels the sunny chords and at-ease ’90s charm. “I’m hanging on to the sunshine,” she sings, her voice full and rich and carrying both the giddiness that line implies and an awareness of how silly that giddiness can feel. “Something Blue” rises, sighs, and rests in its own tension, Viscius’ voice calm with a self-assured form of acceptance. In “Changes,” she hangs a simple lyric on a straightforward melody like a sheet being draped over a clothesline, channeling Mazzy Star and mimicking the soft, gauzy, fresh feeling of realizing you’re able to begin it all again with a new person. “So happy I could scream,” she sings, and then she does.

Oh, but sadness can have its pleasures, too. “Heartbreak can be fun when you put things into perspective and think about how absurd and fleeting life is,” Viscius says. One Million Love Songs was written in the wake of a breakup that prompted a period of deep introspection and a grappling with her own self-destructive tendencies. Many of the songs here take it as a given that love will end. In “Crazy, Baby,” Viscius lays out her approach to love songs: “write one quick ’cause nothing lasts,” she sings, suggesting that any attempt to capture the green shoots of love’s first moments also carries within it the dying and decaying of the tree. “Sweet” is humid with self-loathing, a nearly bluesy lament in the vein of the Velvet Underground’s third record. “I’m so sweet,” she sings, her voice venomous with sarcasm, “don’t you want to get to know me?”

One Million Love Songs was recorded in Asheville at Drop of Sun and produced by Viscius alongside Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Indigo De Souza, Snail Mail), As with Everything, Bnny is primarily Viscius’ solo project, with assistance from her twin sister Alexa Viscius and a rotating cast of friends. The cover is a photo Alexa took of Jess while they were backpacking in Alaska. It’s an ambiguous image—you can read Viscius as relaxed and at ease, or you can read her as completely wiped out and drained. It’s an image that exists out of time, like the love song itself—songs that will always be relevant because people will always find themselves drawn to and apart from one another, with the millions and millions of complications those movements bring. The idea is to embrace all of it while remembering that everything passes. It seems instructive that the last thing Viscius sings on this album is “No one loves me anymore.” It seems equally instructive that she sounds completely free.