Every song on this album was improvised in the studio by the producer Matthew E. White and the sculptor-turned-speak-musician Lonnie Holley, and the result is a free-form slurry of musical ideas driven forward by profoundly cutting societal commentary that appears to have just been on Holley’s mind. In their words, the title track “Broken Mirror” is “mocking this infrastructure of pandering for likes, jeering us all above a savage bassline that dares you to differ.” Another fave, ““I’m Not Tripping,” “is an anthem of self-worth and self-enjoyment for a society mired in self-doubt, the words breaking like light beams through clouds of atomized drums and synths.” Get into it and get weird. That’s certainly what they did.

Here’s where you might want to hold onto the “I’m Not Tripping” song. As we emerge from our Covid coccoons, I want to pass along this warning that the diet industry is waiting in the wings to take your money and make you feel sad. They know you quit your gym. They know you baked bread— AND ATE IT. They even know about the studies that say people actually lost weight in 2020, but even so, our self-consciousness digs deep so they can easily hit us where it hurts. So next time you get an instagram ad for Noom or whever, remember that the industry is also hurting (it lost more than 20% of its value last year), and it’s not your job to fill the void.

(A mantra from Emma Specter: “My body got me through the pandemic. It doesn’t need to be bikini-ready.”)

According to the trainers at Barry’s Bootcamp who are totally about functional fitness and not at all about body image,* legs are the new abs for those of us looking to “cut” specific body parts. Shorts are getting shorter, if you hadn’t noticed, and accordingly, squats and deadlifts have replaced bicep curls and crunches. Would you say we are more or less invested in this than in the Billie Eilish bodice?

*ha