Pixies
– Bossanova
Space doesn’t echo in silence—it shudders with distortion, and Bossanova rides that wave straight through the vacuum. Released in 1990, this was the sound of a band less interested in detonating than in drifting—gravity optional, fuzz mandatory. Black Francis doesn’t bark as much as he beams in, lyrical transmissions garbled and cryptic, while Joey Santiago’s guitar lines bend like light near a dying star. The band had already torn down the blueprint. Here, they started painting the wreckage.
Best of…
Surf rock is used like salt here—spread across the tracks, enough to give it bite without drowning the flavor. There’s tension humming in the spaces between notes, as if each song is about to collapse under the weight of its own weirdness. Kim Deal anchors the madness, her basslines gliding underneath like a calm undercurrent while everything above threatens to unhinge.
It’s not an album made for loud declarations. It prefers the slow burn. There’s a confidence in its restraint, a strange sort of joy in how it floats rather than runs. The Pixies weren’t chasing anything with this record. They were already out there, radioing back from the other side of reason.
Choice Tracks
Velouria
Confirmed on the album, “Velouria” is the closest thing Bossanova has to a pop gem, if you consider lunar pop a genre. It pulses with chiming, melancholy drive. Francis’s vocals are half prayer, half dare, and the theremin warble behind the chorus adds an alien sweetness to the chase.
Is She Weird
This track stares through a warped lens. Staggered guitars grind and stutter, giving Francis room to riddle through his fever dream of a subject. It’s part paranoia, part seduction—catchy in the least conventional sense of the word.
The Happening
A tale of UFOs and missing time told with straight-faced wonder. This is where Bossanova’s sci-fi streak is loudest, built on a steady rhythm that never quite settles, constantly teasing a climax it refuses to deliver. And that restraint? That’s the point.
Ana
Clocking in under two minutes, “Ana” is minimalism through a Pixies filter. It’s all about atmosphere. Francis’s whispered, underwater delivery feels like a hymn sung in a submerged chapel, while Santiago’s surfy licks ripple like sonar across a distant sea.
Bossanova floats in on feedback and leaves a burn mark across the sky. It’s the Pixies playing space rock with a beach blanket in tow—spare, strange, and oddly hypnotic. It doesn’t demand attention, but it sure rewards it.