American Teenager

The brightest, most radio ready song on the record, and its sharpest irony. Built like a heartland anthem, Friday night lights, the flag, the prayer before the game, it hands the narrator every promise America makes to a girl like her and then lets each one quietly fail.

The gloss is the point. Beneath the big chorus is grief for a brother, for a God who does not answer, for a country that sells belonging it never intends to deliver. It is the album at its most accessible and its most disillusioned in the same breath.