Field Medic’s dope girl chronicles is a Blissful Footnote to His Already Impressive 2023

Time has an interesting effect on us music critics. Just take a look at the fact that we, as a collective, have roundly decided that the year is made up not of 12 months, as you might have thought, but 11. If the flood of year-end lists pouring into your timeline is any indication, 2023 is officially over. That is that. For fear of sounding like the very original posters making this same comment year after year around this time, I am mostly kidding—but there is some validity to the idea that the calendar can have an outsized effect on how we look at, say, a new album. To many, Kevin Patrick Sullivan, who parades around as Field Medic, submitted his entry for those 2023 lists back in early September with the release of the excellent light is gone 2. So what precisely do we do with his second 2023 LP, dope girl chronicles, an album that does not fit into our timeline?

As it turns out, time is itself a central theme of this new record. “Seven years ago the prophecy was foretold,” reads Sullivan’s Instagram post hyping the release of dope girl chronicles. This is a reference to—what could be described as the album’s centerpiece—a little country ditty called “do a little dope.” The prophecy began with the original release of the song, which came way back in 2017 as a part of his breakout record (and Run For Cover Records debut) Songs From the Sunroom. The song—a live cut—starts with Sullivan introducing the song to the crowd:“It’s off an album called dope girl chronicles, coming out in 2023,” he says, to a smattering of chuckles. Was this a throwaway joke or a serious, long-term commitment? Do I truly believe this was an album painstakingly planned for seven years? Lucky for Sullivan, prophecies don’t require you to show your work.

Regardless of its origins, dope girl chronicles is clearly distinct from light is gone 2, which intentionally embraced a glitchy, percussive palette—inspired, Sullivan said, by trap music. Here, he mostly leans on what has been his bread and butter throughout his career. He has always had a way with an unadorned acoustic guitar, but dope girl chronicles has some of the most impressive finger-picking he’s ever done: the jumbled cascade of “love don’t come,” the dew-dapped instrumental “intermission,” the Van Zandt-ian “do a little dope.” This is all very much in Sullivan’s wheelhouse as a songwriter. That said, there are a few things here we haven’t heard him do before. A song like “cemetery,” with its thick, chunky chords, front-loaded drums and feedback-heavy vocals, imagines Field Medic sans the bedroom—a surprising turn, if not a particularly successful one.