Jeff's Best of 2025 - #8: Nell Smith - Anxious

Back in 2021, as we slowly exited the pandemic doldrums, we were gifted an album of Nick Cave covers by The Flaming Lips with then-14-year-old Lips fan Nell Smith. That album, Where the Viaduct Looms, was a favorite of mine that year and I waited somewhat impatiently for a proper album from the young woman at the center of it all.

We got that album this year in Anxious, a record that, in so many ways, cannot and will never be separated by the way it came into existence. In so many ways, Anxious is an album that grapples with modern teenage life in a way a 44-year-old man will never fully understand, but is so musically mature that it is truly shocking that someone in their middle teen years put it together so well.

With that maturity, however, comes some true sadness, as it was the release of this album that made me aware that
she passed away in a car accident in late 2024. This album was mostly complete at the time, so it's very much a last will and testament of an artist and talent that was really taken away from us too soon.

I can't say for sure whether or not I'd feel quite as strongly about this album had she been around to see it introduced to the world. I can't say for sure whether or not I'd love this album as much as I do if she wasn't young enough to be my kid. I do know that I loved this album all year, even with the emotional tug of the story that's inextricable from its very existence.

Songs of note: "Anxious," "Daisy Fields," "Boy in a Bubble," "Billions of People"