Girl, You’ll Be a Giant Soon is bathed in a low-wattage glow, like the warmth of a fast-food sign or the blue-tinted incandescence of an infomercial break. There’s a sense of liminal unease driving Virginia Creeper’s third full-length album, palpable in the dissonant space between Michelle Ayoubi’s firmly planted bass and Aaron Arguello’s asymmetrical synthesizer. With every line of Genevieve Poist’s nonlinear poetics, the record inches toward cathartic eruption. “The big event came and went/ No more anticipation/ Now we just live with it,” she sings on “TV After the Super Bowl,” a tiptoeing single haunted by the songwriter’s auto-tuned voice. When the hairs on your neck are properly raised, drummer Kyle Dugger constructs an apprehensive crescendo. Power-pop sensibilities stand out on a distortion-soaked background on “Softball,” “Floater or Plank,” and “Giant Man,” which take turns exploding into a feedback-squeaking, hair-tossing release, but the LP’s final track crafts a more complex resolution. “That Which Isn’t But Should Be Is More Real Than What Is True” takes the quartet back to the acoustic-forward style of their 2020 debut album with diaristic lyricism and delicate harmonic symbiosis that feels like a sunrise through the blinds, peeling you away from a sleepless night.
This article appears in February 6 • 2026.
