It might seem absurd, but this is Kim Deal’s first solo album. The venerable frontwoman has been the main creative force behind some of the most beloved bands of the ’90s, yet she has never put her own name to a work throughout her enduring and varied career. But to ask the tacit icon, this particular album could not have happened at any point except right now. The path to it was hard-won. Addiction, foiled relationships both personal and professional, reunions and new old schisms, the ensuing chauvinist scrutiny, loss of loved ones, and more salt on old scrapes – all of this is constricted into and deployed across Nobody Loves You More’s eleven tracks. Only Deal could have taken all that anguish and turned it into so much beauty.

Nobody Loves You More feels and sounds unmistakably like Deal. Her specific aesthetic touch was always the ace up the sleeve of every project she’s been involved in. Yet, her yen for moving forward, one that the album’s producer Steve Albini once called “relentless,” is felt at every turn. The distinctly ’90s mid-tempo procession of “Coast” is rejuvenated by bellows of brass, “Crystal Breath” is ushered in on a glitchy electronic stomp, and the brash, muscular bass line of “Big Ben Beat” is suddenly undercut with playfully roguish Hawaiian guitar licks. So, if Nobody Loves You More does feel comfortable and nostalgic to long-time fans, it opens countless paths and ideas towards the future just as ably. 

Deal’s words, simple in composition and immensely compounded in implication, also bring generously equal doses of grief and joy. The sweetly-intoned title words of “Are You Mine” would be a saccharine touch in anyone else’s hands, but in truth, is Deal’s tribute to her mother, who asked her the question often in her last months of succumbing to dementia. And when she warbles “We’re having a good time” on Nobody’s closer, it levitates someplace between a command and last rites. 

The main moment here, however, is Deal’s impossibly soulful, draping voice. There was always more than enough to adore musically about The Breeders and the Amps and yes, Pixies, but for many of us, it was always that mischievous and honeyed contralto croon that personified and scored all the innumerable tragic and beautiful aspects that there were to love about quotidian life.