Music journalists tend to want their albums to have a thesis—some pithy, philosophical, headline-ready statement of purpose. This album is an “act of resistance,” that one is a “meditation on grief,” that one a “celebration of queer joy.” The list goes on and on, eventually forcing even the most seasoned critics to break out the thesaurus. I’m absolutely guilty of this trick. I mean, it is efficient. Effective. It’s also increasingly obligatory: The artist must declare their intention, and the critic must announce its meaning. In doing so, we risk reducing meaning to function, framing every work as a problem to be solved.
But the truth is that not every work of art was built to resolve something. Not every song is a strategy, survival tool, or statement. And perhaps we do something quietly violent when we insist on defining every record with some forward-driving verb: fights, heals, resists, accepts, reclaims. What if the point isn’t motion? What if it’s to hold us still—to sit with us, trembling, in the space where meaning collapses? After all, art is arguably the sole medium equipped to live within that otherwise unimaginable gap between problem and solution, sign and signified, word and meaning—so isn’t it possible that, in our efforts to make sense of art, to lift it out of the chasm that only it is capable of exploring, we might lose far more than we gain?
Ezra Furman’s Goodbye Small Head feels almost designed to thwart our efforts at this thesis-based categorization. It’s not a treatise. It’s not a manifesto. It doesn’t convert pain into power, or offer catharsis, or wrap itself in clarity. If it offers anything, it’s what John Keats called negative capability: the capacity to remain in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” That line, though nearly 250 years old, could just as easily be one of Furman’s. “Over the years, I want more and more to live in that place of transcendence,” she tells me during our conversation, her voice choppy but warm through my tinny laptop speakers. “Or at least keep reference of it around me. I want to always keep one hand on that transcendent and unknowable.” For Furman, music isn’t a tool to decode the ineffable. It’s a way to touch it—to make visceral what language itself simply can’t.
“I was gonna be a writer on the page, originally,” Furman says, recounting her time at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. But music, she realized, could do something language alone could not: “There’s a passion in music, songs, records, most of all because it’s more immediate. It’s a thing that is happening to you. You don’t dictate the pace at which you go through the piece. It just hits you, dominates you. I think that’s why it’s music and words instead of just words for me.” She looks off-screen, so visibly searching for the right phrase that it shows on her face when it slots into place. “Music lifts meaning out of the sayable.”
Music is not passive. It is an active force, pushing through you whether you want it to or not. In this sense, it really should come as no surprise that Ezra Furman views music as something uniquely capable of capturing the experiences of living; when discussing her unflinching slow-burn track “Submission,” she describes life itself in a remarkably similar fashion. “You don’t tell life where you’re going. Life tells you, really. And so the question is, I think, about how to show up for real in that moment—how to be awake for the ride as you push through the hourglass.”
Furman’s 10th studio album, written in the wake of illness, sociological terror, collapse, and creative exhaustion, doesn’t resolve that tension. It documents it, in a strange, luminous container of submission—but not of surrender. Staying down after falling doesn’t always mean defeat. Sometimes, it’s a choice: to feel the ache, to touch the ground, to see the world from a new angle. Goodbye Small Head is not the sound of giving up. It’s the sound of giving in—to mystery, to failure, to grief, to God, to all that cannot be named. There is no irritable reaching here, no soothing lie, no thesis. Just a woman trapped in the back of a car, wincing on an electrolysis table, motionless in a bed, hung up “halfways between Heaven and plain”—just a woman in a body, helpless and alone, asking the only question she can: “Is this what it is to be alive?”
EZRA FURMAN’S WORK HAS NEVER followed a straight line. It spirals—doubling back, breaking open, circling ever inward. That’s not to say her discography lacks consistency; on the contrary, she’s quietly amassed one of the most cohesive bodies of work this century. But where most artists frame growth as a kind of accumulation, Furman’s music treats it as a process of removal. It’s the difference between a painter and a sculptor: the former adds until the image takes shape, the latter chisels away until it’s revealed. Each album peels back more surface, cuts deeper, grows stranger, digs closer to the bone.
In 2024, Furman posted a hand-drawn chart on Instagram: three rows, three columns, notebook paper. Across it, she mapped her first nine albums, each slotted into this grid of trilogies: The Harpoons Trilogy (Banging Down the Doors; Inside the Human Body; Mysterious Power), the Self-Discovery Trilogy (The Year of No Returning; Day of the Dog; Perpetual Motion People), and the Anti-Fascist Trilogy (Transangelic Exodus; Twelve Nudes; All of Us Flames). Each trilogy follows the same arc, one album at a time: breakthrough, intensification, transcendence. New language and world-building; then pressure and collapse; then, if you make it, vision. The first album cracks open a door. The second kicks it in. The third lets it swing.
Furman has been opening these doors, so to speak, for a long time—in fact, next year will be her 20th in the music industry. She formed the band Ezra Furman and the Harpoons while still an undergrad at Tufts in 2006, releasing three albums (the Harpoons Trilogy, naturally) in five years. By 2012, she struck out solo with The Year of No Returning, a remarkably assured debut that set the tone for a truly excellent run of albums to come. Her touring bands changed names—the Boy-Friends, the Visions, the Band with No Name—but the voice remained hers: restless, literate, spiritually feral. In the following decade, she churned out both the Self-Discovery Trilogy and the Anti-Fascist Trilogy, the latter concluding in 2022 with the furious and devotional All of Us Flames.
Though she’d long been a cult figure, Furman didn’t break into the mainstream until 2019, when Netflix’s Sex Education turned her into an unlikely soundtrack centerpiece. The show needed a kind of sonic narrator and tapped her to be, in the showrunner’s words, “the Simon & Garfunkel to [Sex Education’s] The Graduate.” Furman delivered: a blend of original tracks and back-catalog cuts curated across four seasons into one of the most memorable musical backbones in recent TV. But she didn’t expect it to become her calling card. “I took the Netflix gig because I was like, ‘Yeah, you work at Starbucks so you can keep doing your sculptures at home,’” she tells me, eyes crinkling. “But, usually the Starbucks job doesn’t become the headline of your art career, you know what I mean?” The realization that Sex Education had become a phenomenon—and that she had, by extension, become part of it—landed like a slap. “I had a bit of a crisis. I panicked a little when it started coming out and I realized, like, ‘Oh, this is a hit show.’ I didn’t know it was going to be a hit show!” she says, throwing her hands up. “And suddenly everybody I ran into at Synagogue was asking me about it!”
That doesn’t mean she isn’t grateful, of course. “It really is sort of the dream gig—especially because it’s such a feminist show, such a sane show,” she admits. “Like, I wish anyone had been talking about sex that way when I was a teenager. It was just fucking American Pie and simply a… rape Olympics of youth culture.” She pauses, stunned by her own phrasing. “…I genuinely don’t know where that phrase came from.” She laughs hard and the mood lifts with her. Even so, the gratitude coexists with a deeper ambivalence: the fear that the show would become the dominant narrative of her career: “It started to really creep me out that this is now the first thing anyone will think about when they’re thinking about me,” she acknowledges.
It’s for that reason, presumably, that the songs she wrote for the show rarely appear in her live sets. “We’ve never played a song we did for that show live, ever. I do have some at solo shows sometimes, because I’m proud of them, still. But I just feel like I wrote them for another thing.” And as her visibility rose, so did the pressure. “It takes a lot of trust to share [music],” Furman continues. “Because you can really only hope that somebody will give a shit about the art the same way that I do.” Which is to say: sometimes, they don’t. Or they give a different kind of shit. Or they listen only partially, or through the filter of a headline, or with their own narrative already in place.
That sense of disconnect—between intention and reception, between art and its afterlife—grew more acute with time, although the reasons for it shifted. This year marks the 10th anniversary of Perpetual Motion People, a record that introduced many listeners to Furman’s voice. But for her, it barely registers. “I have no relationship [to that album]. It seems so far away. I just feel like my life really started after that. Like, who is that? Whoever she was, she was really confused and afraid of her friends and couldn’t really tell the truth—but doing important work to get to a more liberated place, I think.” It feels, she says, like it was written almost by someone else—probably because, in a very real sense, it kind of was.
In 2021, Furman publicly came out as a trans woman—“I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am a woman, and yes for me it’s very complex, but it’s complex to be any sort of woman,” she wrote—and became a mother around the same time. These weren’t revelations so much as recognitions, but they were recognitions made in public, and they carried a weight—one that permeated All of Us Flames a year later. Fuming, intimate, devout, saturated with grief and reverent toward community, it felt like something of a culmination. It was, after all, the “transcendence” chapter of her third trilogy in her retroactive framing of her discography: Transangelic Exodus was the breakthrough, Twelve Nudes the intensification, leaving All of Us Flames to be the spiritual mastery. A reckoning that allowed, finally, for a turn outward.
But the years that followed were brutal. “I thought the last record we made would, like, win five Grammys and end transphobia. Like, ‘Maybe I can carry all these at-risk trans youth in my audience and also save America!’” she says, laughing dryly. As much as it’s a jab at her past self’s naïveté, it carries grief too: “I think I thought, at the time, like, ‘Maybe we can beat back this darkness,’ you know? And then just watching it go more and more poorly, everything falling apart in our hands.” She sighs, putting on a knowing, sad smile. “It was this realization of, ‘Oh, actually, we were never even close.’”
That knowledge made Furman’s role as a public figure and beacon for queer youth feel almost unbearable. She did reach a breaking point eventually. “It wasn’t that I was, like, giving up, but it was just this sense of… I can’t carry everything,” she says, her voice catching slightly. Even through a glitchy Zoom window, the emotion is unmistakable. “I don’t know how to say it, how to talk about just how overwhelming all of it really is. Too much transphobia, too many things being a little bit scary sometimes. And then with touring being such hard work, and getting harder, and getting more corporate, I was like, ‘I can’t— I don’t know if I can do this anymore.’” She snaps her fingers. “And then boom, I collapsed in weakness.”
That collapse was not figurative. On April 11th, 2023, Furman woke up ill, stumbled into the bathroom, and promptly passed out. No doctor could explain it. Nothing helped. Her condition only worsened. “I just had to lie down for two months,” she tells me. She canceled shows. She pulled out of plans. And during that time, she wrote most of Goodbye Small Head—though “wrote” may not be quite right. She tells me of the single day during which she wrote the album’s opening tracks, “Grand Mal” and “Sudden Storm”: “I was just about out of my mind that day. I was scaring myself. I had hypomania. And when those [two songs] showed up, it felt like a hemorrhage.” The songs weren’t merely written; they burst out, forcing their way into being.
That might be the key distinction—if her three trilogies were sermons, Goodbye Small Head is pure confession. “I really feel like those last three, from Transangelic Exodus [through All of Us Flames] were coherent as a progression of self, as a spiritual check-in with both myself and society,” Furman says. “And I do feel that it’s over now. That’s over.” She squints off-camera, as though trying to describe something that doesn’t yet have a name. “I don’t really know why, but at the time it felt really important to be doing this kind of ‘collective speech’ thing in my music. But there’s not a lot of ‘us’ in this record, in Goodbye Small Head.” She pauses. “There’s not really this attempt to speak for a collective. This time, it’s more like me and God alone in a room.”
THAT ROOM, IT TURNS OUT, is crowded—with agony, memory, longing, noise, and most of all, awe. “Awe of an intense sort,” Furman clarifies, pointing towards a kind of awe that forces you to reckon with the understanding at the heart of Goodbye Small Head. “The truth is too wide for one small head to hold inside,” she continues, quoting a couplet cut from the album. Even in its absence, the idea anchors the record (and not only because it obviously was an inspiration for the title, which comes from Sleater-Kinney’s 1999 ode to the dissolution of the self, “Get Up”). Each song contends with the impossibility of knowing, of containing, of failing at both. “I don’t hold the lever,” she warns in the hypnotic opener “Grand Mal.” That surrender of control is essential. This isn’t an album about going off the rails. It’s about discovering there were never rails at all.
Across Goodbye Small Head, Ezra Furman gives us 12 variations on disintegration— sometimes medical, sometimes mystical, often both. The sonic world is equally unstable, as lush orchestration bleeds into overclocked samples and grainy synths crash into string quartets. The two songs written in that burst of hypomania (“Grand Mal” and “Sudden Storm”) open the album with a jolt, thrusting listeners into a strange state of limbo that swings wildly between volatility and serenity, frequently submerging listeners fully into both. “I believe in the shiver that comes in and takes over,” Furman sings. “I don’t wait ‘til it’s over / I bathe in its waves.” Not endures. Not resists. Believes. Bathes. The shiver—disordering, divine—becomes the clearest form of contact, the album’s touchstone. “It’s the circle that holds me,” she croons, collapsing the diagnostic into the mystical: wedding ring, brainwave, ouroboros.
There’s a strange relief in dissolution, in being suspended between ecstasy and collapse—“halfways between Heaven and plain.” It is only here, in this liminal no-mans-land between Earth and sky, this impossible chasm separating the tangible from the immaterial, that one can finally “see clearly, across rolling meadows, around the Earth, curving and surging in pain.” But clarity does not necessarily result in comprehension. In the logorrheic “Sudden Storm,” narrative slips its moorings. “There is no story anymore in the storm,” Furman gasps, her voice ragged. “The computer’s overloaded at the core.” Theology in freefall. God as glitch. Revelation as seizure.
These are songs that know things go wrong in flesh as much as firmware. Throughout the record, the body is not just the site of collapse but the syntax of it. “Submission,” the album’s anguished centerpiece, was written during electrolysis sessions. “I would write more of that song every time I went to electrolysis, on the table, just lying there, getting hurt,” Furman says. “And it hurt—it hurt so much every time—and I just couldn’t stop thinking: ‘Is it supposed to feel like this?’” The experience is both form and content for “Submission,” with Furman’s vocal drawling atop electronic beeps not unlike those produced by the electrolysis machine. “The lights are in my face. I cry and arch my back. Something breaks and I fall through the crack.” Furman’s language is stark, almost surgical, but the pain isn’t clear-cut—it’s religious, mythic, almost a solace. “We’re fucked,” she sings. “It’s a relief to say.”
“I couldn’t believe I was writing that song,” Furman tells me. “I thought it wasn’t what people needed to hear. But then I kind of realized that it’s only when you finally let yourself admit it—like ‘Oh, maybe it’s actually, like, really bad. Maybe it’s already too late. What if it actually feels this bad?’ You can actually have grief. You can mourn.”
It’s a devastating realization, but not a nihilistic one. If anything, “Submission” reframes its titular noun as an almost liberating force. “I’m certain to submit like a bitch,” Furman snarls, “like an old-fashioned punk.” That lyric is deliberate, not flippant. She invokes tropes of humiliation, deviance, and rebellion, and repurposes them through the lens of agency. “If you go to the origin of the term ‘punk,’ it’s not someone who fights and wins,” she explains, “It’s somebody who’s debased and submissive and selling their ass for cigarettes.” Submission, then, is not defeat. It’s refusal: not to play the game, not to fake the win. “And in that space, what becomes possible?” Furman pushes. “What kind of new creature do you become? What can you see that the more held-together refuse to?”
What “Submission” understands—and what Goodbye Small Head returns to—is that mourning requires truth. Real mourning needs stillness, space, and permission. “Let’s see how much I can take,” Furman goads herself at the end of the third verse. “Keep going a little more. I can take a little more.” It sounds masochistic, but it isn’t just pain she’s asking for. It’s duration, continuance—the will to remain alive in a body that hurts, and still hold out your hands for more. This is what makes “You Mustn’t Show Weakness,” the preceding track, all the more chilling. That song doesn’t set the stage for collapse; it tries to forbid it. “You mustn’t show weakness,” Furman warns, half-sneering, half-panicked. “The new world is flawless. You’ve got to have good skin.” It’s a compliance anthem dressed in terror: the song twitches and snaps, taut and tense, repeating internalized mantras like scripture. “Don’t let them see your weakness,” she hisses. “Stay strong, it’s a long way down.” And yet: we know what’s coming next. The fall is already in motion.
It is “Veil Song” that documents what comes next—the postlapsarian aftermath. And it isn’t a revelation or some sense of closure; instead, it’s just a recursive plea: “Can I lift this veil that I’ve been wearing / And the veil beneath the veil beneath the veil?” Furman sings, reedy and soft. Each unveiling only reveals more. The song isn’t about clarity, about the discovery of truth, but the impossibility of it. A lilting acoustic pulse gives shape to its inquiry, and Furman’s voice is laced with quiet urgency. “The bus has crashed, my body’s pinned down under a word,” she laments. “My tongue is tied forever, for always, tied to you.” God appears in the chorus, but not to comfort. “God will hide her pretty face until some daring asker asks: Are you there?” This isn’t the God of transcendence. This is the God who withholds—who remains silent even as all the witnesses beg for answers.
And still, Furman keeps asking. She’s not trying to solve the problem of belief so much as stand inside its perimeter, overwhelmed. “It is a religious record, but more spiritual than religious, maybe,” she says, after I ask about the spiritual charge running through the album. “A bit less… parochial, maybe. I feel like the last record was all that; a lot of reading the Bible. This is more the Zohar.” In other words, it’s not organized religion Goodbye Small Head is reaching for, but a rawer mysticism—the sensation of contact with something incomprehensibly vast. “Our narrative of everything being understandable or safe or logical is flawed; everything’s bigger than that,” she adds. “But also, our narrative of everything being terrible is just way too small, too. That’s the thing—you’re only ever seeing such a small little piece of reality.”
That tension—between knowing and not knowing, between part and whole—animates the album. “What are you going to do with the too-muchness?” Furman asks. “What can you do with the understanding we all have that the way our knowledge is operating is really just so provisional, that it’s just a tiny little square? Where do you put all the rest of everything?” That’s where “Power of the Moon” lives: in the blurriness of the overflow. “We take the frame from the painting,” she sings, “and let the colors bleed out into the room.” Once they’re running, “you can’t turn nothing back into something.” It’s not just a lyric, but a cosmology.
The blur sharpens slightly on “A World of Love and Care,” a late-album anthem and burst. It’s a last-ditch reach for the collective, the “we” that much of Goodbye Small Head leaves behind. But even here, the vision is tenuous. “Love and dignity was supposed to be a priority for us,” Furman sings, her voice raw. “But you got caught in a bad dream.” There’s no fantasy of repair; only the million-dollar question: Can we still imagine something gentler, even after everything? Then comes the final plunge. “I Need the Angel”—a cover of a song by her friend Alex Walton—is the album’s closing cry, and its most desperate. The arrangement is towering, enormous, scorched. Furman chants the refrain like a prayer: “I must need the angel / She sure as hell don’t need me / I must need the angel / So I can have a place to be.” By the song’s end, Furman is gasping—actual, audible gulps for air were left in the final mix. That’s how the album concludes. No metaphors, no words. Just a body, burning its way through a prayer.
It’s a fitting end—the way it closes not on language, but breath. Goodbye Small Head doesn’t pretend that language can carry the weight of grief, or faith, or beauty. But while we can’t explain the ineffable, we can gesture towards it, outline the shape of it in sound and breath. “Beyond the limits of language is where I plan to spend most of eternity,” Furman says at one point, and it’s the closest thing to an artistic credo I’ve ever heard. Throughout our conversation, she is often searching. Her hands flit in and out of frame, sketching invisible shapes. Her sentences loop and stall, doubling back mid-thought. Watching her, I’m struck by how familiar it feels—how much it reminds me of my own near-constant struggle with language, my pervasive suspicion that communication is less about precision and more an impossible act of conjuration. Language resists interpretation the way time resists the clock: By the time you’ve measured it, it’s already moved. The word you need hovers just out of reach—because it’s not a word, it’s a feeling. You can trace its outline, but you will never name it cleanly.
That’s why we need art, in my opinion: not to cross the chasm between pure experience and language’s stilted approximation, but to inhabit it. Grammar, logic, and the search for “sense” all attempt to build a bridge, and they inevitably fall through every time. Art builds a home inside it instead, mapping the cave walls rather than attempting the Sisyphean task of scaling them. This, it seems, is where Goodbye Small Head exists: not on the mountaintop, but in the gorge. Not preaching, but keeping vigil. The album never pretends the mystery can—or should—be solved, no matter how much we might want it to. Instead, Ezra Furman offers the tremble of a breath, the shiver of something just out of reach. Goodbye Small Head doesn’t try to resolve the unresolvable. It doesn’t build a bridge out of the chasm. It sets up camp inside it. It waits with you until morning.
Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
