Ground Control Touring

For 99% of artists, the music industry is a meat grinder, constantly whirring, forever hungry for something fresh to pulverize. At only 22, Olivia Osby knows this better than most; a semi-public figure online since she was 14 , breaking through with her band Lowertown at 18, Osby has been around the block enough times to have met her fair share of people who want to optimize her art and on-sell her dreams. It’s enough to break anyone – which makes it all the more remarkable that No Bones, Sickly Sweet, her self-released second album as Olivia O, is less a capitulation to the immense pressures that the industry places on its young female stars as much as an outright rejection of them. It embraces the things we’re taught to reject – pain, boredom, quiet – and uses them as fuel for an album that’s at turns raw, upsetting and profoundly beautiful.

Existing firmly in a canon of defiant outsider musicians that stretches from Linda Perhacs and Karen Dalton through to Alex G and Salvia Palth, No Bones, Sickly Sweet is a strident statement of Olivia’s resilience as well as a love letter to the rich, restorative power of DIY music. Almost entirely written, recorded, produced,mixed, and mastered by Olivia – her Lowertown bandmate Avsha Weinberg contributes to a handful of tracks, and Sean Henry plays on one song – No Bones, Sickly Sweet is haunting and strange, uncomfortable and, ultimately, invigorating, for both listener and author.

Written and recorded during stints in New York and her hometown of Atlanta over the past few years, the revelations contained within No Bones, Sickly Sweet stem from feelings of isolation and boredom that Olivia consciously found herself working to sit with, rather than escape or distract herself from. This is music for loners through and through, concerned with phantom stalkers and personifications of feelings like dread and self-loathing. “This album is very personal and vulnerable – a lot of it was made during periods of spending excessive time by myself,” she says. “It’s me trying to confront things that I’ve been avoiding, and sort of a retaliation against things I’ve been feeling really grossed out or confined by.”

Some of those things, like jealousy or comparison, are rendered vividly on No Bones, Sickly Sweet, Olivia’s stark songwriting style illuminating feelings that might otherwise be seen as ugly or unpalatable. “One Hit Wonder,” a hypnotic dirge led by Olivia’s discordant guitarwork, reckons with her desire to be liked by her peers and fans, slipping down a black hole of self-loathing into speculation on what would happen if she were to one day blow up her whole career onstage. “There’s a weird power you have in that one moment of destroying yourself, where it’s all on your own terms,” she says. “Most people are scared to risk destruction, and they’ll do anything to have self-preservation, even if it’s at the cost of being their true selves.” True to that idea, No Bones, Sickly Sweet is named for the kind of product churned out by artists who sell their souls to the industry: easily digestible Content, devoid of integrity or real feeling.

The kinds of intrusive thoughts chronicled on “One Hit Wonder” crop up throughout No Bones, Sickly Sweet. On the intense, angular “Roof Song,” written on her roof in New York, Olivia writes about a “demon guy” who haunted her for weeks during a deep depression, who “just hated me and every single thing I’d say.” “Rejection,” also written in New York, is about the deep sense of alienation Olivia felt in the city, in comparison to the warmth she feels in the South. “A lot of my closest friends that I love felt really distant from me, and instead of being a logical person and being like ‘They’re probably going through something’, I always turn it on myself,” she says.

The relative darkness of No Bones, Sickly Sweet is counteracted by songs of immense beauty whose radiance is undeniable, even as they toy with ideas of romance and compulsion, friendship and jealousy. “My” plays like a lullaby left to rot and decompose in the sun, its remembrances of past joys tempered by memories of toxic relationships and images of a face “on TV, twisted, buttered up, bright, smooth, shiny.” “Betty” is the kind of harsh obsession song that would make Courtney Love proud, Olivia singing not-so-sweet nothings to the song’s titular fixation with a menacing growl. These songs confront unhealthy feelings with grace and reality, never shying away from the everlasting challenge of finding a sense of humanity in a world that encourages hatred and resentment.

That feeling is never more clear than on “Hole,” a rare moment of self-determination on an album otherwise interested in the way that hitting rock bottom can reveal truths about daily life. It contains the album’s closest thing to a singalong chorus: “I’d rather roll over into a hole in the ground/Than let you touch me now.” There’s something raw, practically fatalistic, about that idea – that sometimes asserting yourself can look like a step backwards, rather than a leap forwards – but there’s a liberating truth in that feeling, an idea that seems to speak to No Bones, Sickly Sweet as a whole. I used to think my songs felt boring or amateur because they were simple,” Olivia says. “While writing this album I returned to the innocent simplicity of my earlier music - approaching it with minimalism in mind, only adding to a song if it had a purpose, forcing myself not to overcomplicate out of insecurity. I wasn’t going to pressure myself to add more because I felt like a song was too simple, or to assert that I’m a ‘real musician’. I’m a real musician if I just write a song with one chord.”