Cascadia Calling, 2025.08.18
"be my deceiver and you can give it to me"
You should go buy Rain McMey’s new record. I say this up top, because there’s an urgency to my recommendation that you should spend the ~$10 to buy At the End of Everything. If you delay you’ll find yourself having missed the perfect moment to listen to it. It won’t make nearly as much sense as a musical artifact in a few years’ time. And it would be a pity to miss your chance, because this is a weird, fearless little record that is well worth your attention.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that McMey, a singer I’d only recently discovered, were releasing their debut album. I was familiar with a few of the singles they’d released online (“Apocalypse Buddy”, “Just for Being English, These Days”) and found them both catchy and charmingly sardonic. What I wasn’t prepared for was more or less an entire album for more of the same.
As I’ve written at length here before, making music that is both political and good poses unique challenges. Making a first album where the majority of the music is explicitly political seems like playing music on hard mode.
Fortunately, McMey is up to the task.
There’s a charming blend of clever irony and directness on display in At the End of Everything. McMey is talented enough to make great music, smart enough to make it intellectually gripping and clever, and open-hearted enough to make it about the honest pains of living through all-pervading crisis. I think this blend is best on display in “Not Growing Up”. The plaintive, wistful refrain of “maybe we should fuck around like we used to, smoking rollies on the ground, do I know you?” oozes life-affirming nihilism. The whole song is a surprisingly poppy meditation on enjoying life as best one can on a doomed planet.
The most interesting thing about the album is how aggressively specific and current it is. This is an album of the middle few years of the 2020s. We’re often trained to expect music that’s too of-the-moment to be hastily written and poorly executed, but McMey has done something truly notable here by having the guts to produce a genuinely great record that’s almost entirely and explicitly about this exact moment in our exact world. It’s the kind of artifact that won’t make any sense to a listener in 20 years, but is indispensible now.
There’s another way in which McMey’s songwriting is perfect for this era. They have an incredible mastery of the building songs around searingly brilliant hooks. The kind of flawless little gems of lyric and melody that will get stuck in your head or, indeed, sound rad for a few seconds in short-form video before you swipe upwards. The songs that McMey builds around sometimes seem to serve as scaffolding for those great little moments, but they’re good enough to justify the songs all on their own. (My favorite is the dark, dancy chorus on “Zuckerdaddy”: “Bones bones skin and bones, skip to the beat of the reaper drones”)
It’s truly a record unlike any I’ve heard and you will be doing yourself a favor by checking it out.
At the End of Everything by Rain McMey is out now on Bandcamp and releases on streaming services on Sept. 19th.