Despite the challenges of finding something original to say about romance, How Do You Love? harnesses the Regrettes’s infectious enthusiasm for their material to make the familiar sound new again. Though it’s not driven by a cohesive narrative per se, the album is conceptually orientated around the birth, growth, and collapse of a relationship, charting a romance as it moves from the first stirrings of love to its painful dissolution.
The album opens with a minute-long spoken-word piece in which singer/guitarist Lydia Night asks the titular question, which is less rhetorical than a direct challenge: How do you love? And in an attempt to answer that question, the band launches into “California Friends,” a coiled snake of a song that starts with Night inviting us to “come a little closer.” Night’s bandmates serve as her internal monologue, shouting “No way!,” “Just stay!,” and “Okay!” as she weighs the pros and cons of her potential partner. In a moment of self-referentiality and a wink to the time-honored pastime of making a potential partner a mixtape, Night sings about “a band from California” before she offers to “make you a playlist of their songs.”
Elsewhere, the lyrics of lead single “I Dare You” detail an illicit young romance: “My mom tries to catch me/But I know all the back streets” is both a clever slant rhyme and a brilliant, specific image that immediately sets the scene. The song paints a picture of a relationship marked by the tension between being supportive and egging each other on: “You’re gonna fall, but I’ll catch you…C’mon and jump/Well, I dare you!” It’s a sublime three minutes, perfectly capturing the heady rush of young love, as the band sing-shouts the last line back and hits the chorus while guitarist Genessa Gariano picks out an angular lead part.
The back half of How Do You Love? traces the part of a relationship that follows the initial headrush, when you realize that maybe the person you fell for isn’t “the one.” “Go Love You” is a clever exploration of the connection between sex and love, with Night’s acid delivery making it clear that “love” is standing in for a different four-letter word. “Pumpkin” draws on pop-cultural touchstones including Romeo and Juliet and The Notebook for its metaphorical unpacking of the moment when you realize a relationship is doomed. The hook has an almost doo-wop feel as Night sighs, “Pumpkin, pumpkin, you’re gonna kill me.”
By the closing title track, a rave-up with a shout-along chorus, Night has been through the darkness and come out the other side. When she asks, “How do you love?,” her voice hitting a melismatic series of high notes on the word “love,” the album’s emotional arc comes full circle. What began as a direct question, asked of the listener, is now almost—but not quite—out of the singer’s reach. The message seems to be that love is difficult, but not impossible, and the rewards are sublime. Throughout, these songs depict human connection in all its messy glory, making the case that the glory is worth the mess.
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