I used to write about music. Or, that’s what I tell people. 

It’s not that it’s an outright lie, there was a really cool and exciting six months back in 2019 where I was reviewing albums for the music site XSNoise (Frank Carter & the Rattlesnakes, Mavis Staples, Bastille, and The Black Keys) whilst also trying to cover the local music scene in Portsmouth. I didn’t get paid for any of it, and it was only six months. Why did I stop? Well, I graduated uni, got a job, and the 12 hour days (commuting time included) working in publishing killed my free time and desire to write stone dead. 

But I still talk about it. It might’ve only been six months, but I miss it. I might still be at that same job, but I’ve managed to rekindle my ability to write in the last couple years and as if I hadn’t given myself enough projects, I think it’s time to take on a new one. And back when I was at uni, the advice was always “you need to have a blog”; these days, blogs have become newsletters– but I already pay real money for this WordPress subscription, and I’ve not got the budget to add a third party newsletter to my expenses. 

So here we are! Writing about music! I figure it should be at least 500 words, every fortnight or so. A reasonable challenge, right? And the first post is always going to smash that by the necessity of including an introduction. I’m already over halfway to the minimum requirement and all I’ve talked about is myself. And I’ll talk about myself for a moment more, thank you very much. 

You might be wondering, “Phoebe, why should we care about your thoughts on various music?” And it’s true, I’m not musically trained, and I don’t know the technical terms. I do know that if I keep this up for long enough, I’ll force myself to learn them, however. So, what are my qualifications? A creative writing degree (First Class!) and the opinion that a repetitive, gnarly, guitar solo is the sexiest thing I can think of. You know the type, the ones that go on so long that they’re basically edging you with the expectation of when they’ll throw it back to the melody.  And when they do? Well, it’s definitely climactic, isn’t it? 

So I have a qualification in writing, and strong opinions about music. I’ve also spent almost a decade reviewing and analysing media as an editor, so I’m pretty good at having judgements. 

All that’s left to ask – though the intro alone has already brought us 40> words shy of our word count – is to consider where to begin? 

Apologies, I Have None. 

A four-piece punk band from London, leaning to the heavier side of the genre, and were predominantly active from 2011-2019. As such, it’s a struggle to find much evidence of them online these days. Though their social pages are still up (instagram, for example) all bios have been scrubbed and there’s been no new posts in years. Though on spotify, a bio still exists. In their own words, AIHN is:

A sonic lurch from agony to clarity, from catharsis to doom.

London’s Apologies, I Have None chronicle compulsion and struggle, digging deeper into what drives people to ruin themselves and what compels us to keep trying in a black, collapsing world. Set in a place where escape is a pill, a bag or a bottle and salvation resides beneath a glowing green neon cross, AIHN’s music prevails intimacy and honesty whilst enduring bitterness and despair.

To me, AIHN is a band I found at the right time to capture my heart and like the worst kind of love, I’ve been chasing the chance to see them again for nearly a decade. I almost came close, in 2023, because they were playing Till the Fest, but I missed that gig to spend a weekend with a situationship. Yes, I have regrets. 

Though there are gaps in my memory as to when I found AIHN (surely they’ve always just been there) my best guess is that I found them by way of supporting The Bennies, who I found by way of supporting the Smith Street Band, who I found because a dear friend of mine recommended them. I was nebulously fifteen, very unhappy, and in the depths of my worst habits. I won’t be so cliche to claim that AIHN’s sophomore album Pharmacie ‘saved my life’ but it did make me feel seen.  It’s an album, as their spotify bio suggests, which is an unflinching picture of what it’s like to struggle with mental health, with the desire to be alive, but without romanticising that pain or making it beautiful. It is honest, and intimate, and through their frankness that AIHN strikes upon something hopeful. 

It’s hard to feel that lonely, crushing ache of despair when you’re standing in a room of a hundred people all instinctively belting out lyrics in unison, inspired only by a few rising cords and lights going up. Even if you’re standing at the back of the pub and kicking yourself for not saying more to the lead singer when he smiled at you on the way to the green room. 

Which is the nature of the first song of the album. To me, Pharmacie is bookended by songs which resonate with hope. Though ‘Love and Medication’ is lyrically quite negative, detailing the exhaustive frustration of being trapped in the cycles of bad mental health, there’s something in the way the song unfolds musically which signifies the start of something. Which makes sense. Perhaps it’s the soft, resonant tone that sets the expectation of more. More being the two rising piano chords (an instrument which doesn’t appear much throughout the album), which in turn build into the steady drumbeat which’ll quicken your heart to match its pace in excitement. Or, you could say it’s a drumbeat which echoes the pace of a panic attack. But anxiety and excitement are, after all, two sides of the same coin. 

The sense that ‘Love and Medication’ is building to something, to me, makes the second track of the album a surprise. Not unlike a punch to the face, or a shift from depression to mania; certainly not unfittingly for the themes of the album. If ‘Love and Medication’ is exhaustion at your own failings, ‘Wraith’ is a song about finally getting angry about it. It’s anger at yourself, it’s the impatience of people around you when you’ve been broken for too long. It’s a crashing, somewhat cyclical, lament, delivered through whispered gritted teeth until the urge to scream is overwhelming.  

Next on the tracklist is ‘The Clarity of Morning’ and ‘Anything Chemical’ – two songs which have not graduated from the album to a curated playlist. After the one-two punch of the first songs, a younger Phoebe would’ve considered these to be the duds. But this is not only an exercise in memory, but rediscovery, and there’s a poetry to the lyrics which I can appreciate more now that I’m older. A core theme of Pharmacie is the struggle of relationships, romantic and otherwise, of trying to reconcile love for another person with self loathing. It’s odd to call these two songs ‘quiet’ – like the rest of the album, they alternate between the softer sung delivery and then desperate shouting, the guitars are heavy and the drums don’t cease. But they aren’t as commanding as other tracks from Pharmacie, perhaps.

At the midway point to the album, ‘Goodbye, Peace of Mind’ returns to form. Not a lift, but another heavy-hitting track that demands attention, somehow it’s stylistically halfway between ‘Love and Medication’ and ‘Wraith’ – but certainly wouldn’t make sense to run between them. This song, and the album is general, doesn’t rush or race from beginning to end. There is a deliberate pacing to the song and the tracklist. 

As made obvious by the transition from ‘Goodbye, Peace of Mind’ into ‘Crooked Teeth’ – another quieter, softer track. Overarchingly, ‘Crooked Teeth’ is a much needed breather before the heavy hitting (and most popular song from the album) ‘Everybody Want to Talk About Mental Health’, but it stands apart from previously ‘quieter’ songs for never engaging the drums and presenting the song only with vocals, guitar, and background synthesisers. Lead singer Josh Mckenzie’s voice dominates the audio, with the rest of the band providing echoing backing vocals from about halfway in. ‘Crooked Teeth’ is a hard look in the mirror, a melancholic soliloquy delivered in the darkness of an empty stage, dripping in remorse. 

‘Everybody Wants to Talk About Mental Health’ then, is another return to anger. Mirroring the realistic nature of emotions – anger is always secondary to sadness or fear, but it certainly hits harder, sounds louder. Slower to build in its rage than ‘Wraith’, ‘Everybody Wants to Talk About Mental Health’ is the song that landed this album for me. At nebulously fifteen, sixteen, pushed to my limits and unable to hide my problems, I was forced to confront my own mental health and seek help. But I do not come from a family of ‘talkers’ and even now, the line “I’d love to remember a single time that I was a real person, but / I’m not convinced I ever truly was” pulls on a still raw and tender heartstring. 

Of course, decentering myself from the narrative for the moment, perhaps one of the reasons AIHN’s music hits so particularly effectively, and feels so intimate and raw, is that it’s not just discussing mental health. It’s discussing men’s mental health. AIHN’s music consistently wrestles with the place of a man in the patriarchy, with the expectations and deadly trappings of masculinity. It’s vulnerable and intimate, both a cry for help and a rallying cry. ‘Everybody Wants to Talk About Mental Health’ is a deeply personal protest against the passive nature of talk without action, but on a smaller scale, it’s also a song which captures the anxiety of honesty, and how for men, aggression is an easier substitute to expel and distract from their feelings. No matter how “unwanted” it is. 

For the next two songs, I’ve not got too much to say. No opinion years in the making like an uncultured pearl. Looking at the tracklist, knowing that ‘A Pharmacy in Paris’ is so tantalisingly close, I’m tempted to skip through just to get to the track I like, even if that means the album would be over faster. But unfortunately, ‘It’s Never the Words you Say’ is another song that doesn’t demand attention, and after 7 tracks, feels slightly indistinguishable. Perhaps it’s too consistently full-on in the first instance, unrelenting and heavy for the first 3.5 minutes before giving way to softness, whilst songs such as ‘Goodbye Peace of Mind’ and ‘Love and Medication’ have a sense of push and pull between chorus and verse. 

‘Killers’, equally, has failed to make an impact on my life. Which I almost feel guilty about, for like ‘Crooked Teeth’ this song has a certain intensely personal and autobiographical nature to it. Perhaps worth mentioning that the song is also just shy of 8-and-half minutes long, and inversely to ‘It’s Never the Words You Say’, spends the first three minutes in a state of limbo; McKenzie’s now signature breathy singing competes with the full band (contrastingly to the paired back nature of ‘Crooked Teeth’) in a way that doesn’t immediately give the listener something to grab onto. There’s a delicious three minutes of the song that are purely music. Excellently executed music, the kind that could soundtrack the closing moments of a movie that is bittersweet but satisfying, and this I could listen to and latch onto.

But I’m disappointed when the vocals come back in the closing 30 seconds. 

And then there’s ‘A Pharmacy in Paris’. Perfectly chosen as the final track to this album, there’s no other place in the runtime where the opening line “This confession has meant nothing”, delivered with startling (and somewhat uncharacteristic) clarity could belong in this ongoing exploration of mental health. Maybe I love this song so much because I’m a sucker for punk tracks which are unintentionally love songs (see, ‘I Wanna Watch the World Burn’ by Refused as another key example), but I know the characters in this story. The poetic structure to the lyrics, from “I was the pills that kept you steady / you were the opiates that talked me down” to “I was the ghost in your machine / your were the chink in the armour of my self doubt” is satisfying. It’s real and it’s passionate, and somewhat despondently needy:  two broken people trying to use the love they have for each other to compensate for all else.

Who hasn’t held onto a bad relationship because being loved – no matter how painfully – is less scary than being alone? 

But Phoebe, you said Pharmacie was an album bookended by hope – what’s hopeful about the painful way in which love can heal and hurt? 

Firstly, when you’re mentally ill and hate yourself, it is possible to love someone to the point of learning to love yourself, too. It’s hard, and unnatural when you’ve been self loathing for so long, and when it feels like your entire identity is built around just how “difficult” it is to love you. But I’m learning that if I stop being so fucking self-centered and actually try to listen to the people I love, I might be able to see myself through their eyes. It’s unnerving to realise that the image of you which lives in the mirror and your mind doesn’t match the reflection in love’s eyes, but doesn’t make it unreal. 

But, specifically in regards to this song, I’d say ‘A Pharmacy in Paris’ is primarily hopeful for its instrumental elements, much like ‘Love & Medication’ – it’s a crescendo in execution.  Though, to listen to the lyrics, there’s certainly a paradox between my sentiment and the meaning of the words. But perhaps I find ‘A Pharmacy in Paris’ hopeful because I find it comforting, because ultimately, Pharmacie is an album that makes me feel seen. 

As the song takes a purposeful 40-odd seconds to fade to silence, it’s not a hollow or fleeting feeling. Even though I only really like 6/10 songs on the album, it’s satisfying and meditative to listen to. There’s no overt narrative to the tracklist, but for a sophomore album of a band which has yet to break into headlining a mid-sized venue, there’s a clear artistic intent and curation to it. Unsuspectingly political, and romantic without romanticising the exhausting struggle of being mentally ill, Pharmacie is a bittersweet sign that Apologies, I Had None could’ve grown into something much bigger. To see them live was a unifying experience, and this is definitely an album (with its pattern of crescendos and repeated opportunities for call and response) which at times felt somewhat spiritual in the way the best gigs can. They were also the band that introduced me to Safe Gigs For Women, which was honestly very fucking cool (and very fucking disappointing I’ve only seen them at one other gig in the 10-or-so years since). 

I miss them. I wish I was bold enough to have told them how much their music meant when I had the chance. 

Let me know if you see their name on a gig poster sometime, won’t you? I have love, I will travel.