Album Review: Blue Reminder by Hand Habits

The songs form a delicate seesaw between joy and quiet unease, exploring the exhilarating but occasionally terrifying question: what happens when happiness fills previously hollow feelings? Not that the album is jam packed full of 'love songs' per se but we're confronted with propulsive guitar riffs and taut rhythms underscoring lyrics that wrestle with the weight of past loves, romantic or otherwise. Duffy situates this personal revelation in the context of queer and trans joy. Amid cultural backlash and raging intolerance, this album stands as a quiet rebellion, a celebration of love not just surviving, but thriving.

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Meg Duffy's fourth album as Hand Habits brings about subtle shifts. Not only in themes, but sonically in almost every carefully constructed song. Their prior album, Fun House, found Duffy processing deeply-seated grief. While placeholder before that also dealt with being left behind in the romantic sense.

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If you were to combine the forward-thinking nature of A Saucerful of Secrets with The Kick Inside‘s steely confidence, then Blue Reminder might be the artistic love child. Although Hand Habits is effectively a thinly veiled nom de plume for Meg Duffy, a long-time Kevin Morby collaborator and guitarist extraordinaire, this 2025 record is suffused with instrumentation and ambient textures, making it an exquisite world to slip into. Embedded in the padding comes a striking voice, embracing the mania that surrounds the artist through loud and quiet, good and bad; electric and orchestral.

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