Crucial Track for January 12, 2026

"Sane" by Fear of Men

#365songs (12 / 365)

Fear of Men's first album Loom was made up of pleasantly ominous dream-jangle-pop. It was pretty good but did not remotely prepare me for Fall Forever, which removes the jangle and curdles the "dream" in "dream-pop" into a kind of nightmare. The R.E.M.-ish guitar is gone, replaced by icy synths and long sustained notes, manipulated vocals and reversed sounds. The drums are more often than not just hammering relentlessly on sixteenth notes, or absent entirely. And Jessica Weiss's voice is glassy and sweetly sinister over it all. It was pretty hard to pick one song off this album because it's so all of a piece to me, but "Sane" has all the pieces that make Fall Forever so compelling and uncanny and is catchy besides.

Fear of Men did release a single four years after Fall Forever that points in a really intriguing direction, but it's been over five years since that and nothing more so far but a couple tracks from a Jessica Weiss solo project. I'm sad that this is all there's been since Fall Forever dropped ten years ago, but if that's it for the band, I really think they went out on a near-perfect album.