COVER STORY | Kim Deal, You Were Worth the Wait

“I don’t know where I am, and I don’t care,” a familiar voice begins on a title track called “Nobody Loves You More.” The voice belongs to a 63-year-old Kim Deal, as she strums a guitar and a string accompaniment walls up around her. Her new album opens like it was built in EastWest Studios—its orchestra-like backline, delicate strumming, horns galore, a baroque melody awash with Kim’s cigarette-weathered vocal and the late Steve Albini’s engineering. It sounds nothing like the material that has lionized her as one of her generation’s writers and wailers, but it comes to life with a touch that is so distinctively hers—countermelodies, feedback, crushing chord stridence, and superb, gracious anchors of symphonic decoration. Nobody Loves You More arrives some forty-five years after Kim and her twin sister, Kelley, would spend nights at the Hara Arena in the Trotwood suburb of her native Dayton, Ohio, or at the famous Bogart’s an hour south in Cincinnati—where they’d watch rock acts like UFO, Rush, Heart and Ted Nugent shred stages in half. Those were the heavy sounds that made her band the Breeders possible, and it’s a guitar-god style that welcomed albums like Pod and Last Splash into the pantheon of alternative music.

So it’s fascinating then, that some of Kim’s new material—like “Coast,” “Are You Mine?” and “Wish I Was”—sounds like bonafide pop traditionalism and those countrypolitan, ABC-Paramount studio joints like Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, an album her dad loved and an album I immediately thought of when the horns and strings crescendo midway through “Nobody Loves You More.” “I don’t know if I would have thought of it as pop, but it definitely isn’t a typical thing,” Kim says. “I mean, it’s got a horn section! I was excited to do it, but I was hesitant—like, ‘I’m gonna have a horn section??’ I made Kelley try all of these phrases of the horn that I had in my head that sounded like it was a horn. ‘Kelley, will you play all of these on guitar?’ I recorded her. I did a little mix for myself and I listened to it. It was like, ‘Man, this is getting really redundant, having the same instrument doing the same thing. I think I’m gonna have to be singing on a song with a horn section.’ I had to deliberately say, ‘Okay, do I feel safe?’” Kim pauses for a moment. “I’m fucking around—that’s just how it sounded in my mind.”

Nobody Loves You More isn’t like your typical Breeders album, but it’s not a spitting image of the Charli XCX-pilled template that’s colored 2024 either. It’s a collage of rock ‘n’ roll, both popularized and marginalized, standardized and radicalized. There’s lounge pop, electronica, Berlin synth music and, for every sugary coo and woozy, swooping waltz, you get something like the metallic, chord-happy jolt of the call-and-response-coded “Disobedience,” which rings out with a vocal melody that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early 2010s pop-punk record. “If this is all we are,” she sings in a hush, before belting out the kicker: “I’m fucked!”

Instead of pulling another hair-raising, face-melting reference from her rolodex of ingenue, Kim turned to an unlikely source to unlock not the style of Nobody Loves You More, but the attitude: Playboy After Dark, the syndicated, Hugh Hefner-hosted variety show that aired on Screen Gems between 1969 and 1970, was one of the bigger reference points for Kim when she was making Nobody Loves You More. “It looks like extras for Casino, or something, sitting there in a small crowd,” she says. “Sammy Davis, Jr. would come up [and perform] in a very small, intimate space. Everybody’s smoking.”

“Summerland,” which features this feathered, orchestral revue of skittering strings, exists because Kim sang the arrangements and then, without writing sheet music, pieced out every note for the album’s arrangers, Susan Voelz and Paul Mertens, because she didn’t know how else to get the sounds out of her head. “Summerland” features a ukulele, an instrument gifted to Kim by Albini after she played at his and Heather Whinna’s wedding in Hawaii. She’d wanted to show the track to her Breeders bandmate Josephine Wiggs, but she “looked at the uke and said, ‘Absolutely not!’” “It’s like, ‘Yeah, you know, of course it’s not “appropriate,”’ Kim says. “She’s an old-school goth, so she’s not gonna have this uke on any record that she’s appearing on. It would pain her… She probably would do it if I persuaded her, but it would be painful for her.”

After listening to Nobody Loves You More, my takeaway from it is rather contradictory—because I feel like I know Kim Deal better than ever now, but that revelation also leaves me with more questions about her than before. “Do you think that this is the most autobiographical album you’ve ever made?” I ask Kim. “I don’t know about that,” she responds, jerking away from the question. “It’s odd, I don’t know why I have a bad reaction to ‘autobiographical.’ Maybe it’s because it’s a slippery slope when I start talking about this. If women write about stuff that happened to them, or things that they’re talking about in their mind, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s their diary.’ If a man—Nick Cave, or these big people with big thoughts in their heads—are thinking about what’s happening to them in their life, it doesn’t get denoted as a diary. But, yeah, it’s shit that happened to me that I think about, for sure… But all the other ones are too, you know?”

When Kim released the lead single “Coast” in July, the first words we heard from her were “I’ve had a hard, hard landing, I really should duck and roll out of my life.” She has been vocal about her sobriety, which makes “Coast” an especially vulnerable part of Nobody Loves You More. It’s a very mosaic picture of kids playing on the beach, while a protagonist comes down from a drug habit, as if it’s this very film-like juxtaposition. But the “coast” in question is not the picturesque destination that the medley of horns suggests it to be, nor are the “kids” really kids (they were in their 20s or 30s, according to Kim).

While writing “Coast,” Kim took inspiration not just from Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” (“We’re on a ride to nowhere, come on inside” / “We’re on the road to paradise, here we go”), but from the cover of their album Little Creatures and its “fields of Middle America” artwork—using the “I’m an idiot and they are doing water sports” requiem to acquiesce with the ocean-side elites. “I’m married to a guy from Boston who loves Boston,” Kim says, speaking about her ex-husband John Murphy. “He’s a guy who loves his city. Not everybody loves their city, even if they’re from a great city like Boston. The guy LOVED Boston and he thought the Midwest was stupid and he thought it was funny that David Byrne was doing that… He was talking about people from FUCKING Boston, anyway, who think like that! Everybody on the coast thinks the inside of the country is stupid, and maybe we are! We very well could be stupid, but we’re our own type of stupid.”

She also found refuge in a band called the Grape Whizzers playing Margaritaville at a friend’s wedding and began imagining her own wasting away: “Clearly all of my life I’ve been foolish, tried to hit hard but I blew it. But it don’t even matter, it’s just human to want a way out. It’s human to wanna win.” I’ve been thinking about how Beth Gibbons just put out her first proper solo album 30 years after the first Portishead album came out—how much of a gift it must have been to wait so long to say hello, and to do it on your own terms. It makes me wonder about whether or not anyone can age gracefully on tape, or if that’s something you can’t ever control—that you have to just write the songs, record them, play them, and everything else is up to the internet, or the critics, or whomever is going to hold the measuring stick. “I mean, do you want to age gracefully on tape?” Kim asks me. “Maybe this album does have more graceful moments than maybe All Nerve did. To not suck? That’s definitely a possibility, hopefully. That sounds like a bad idea, if you ask me.”

So what made Kim Deal want to finally release a record under her own name 38 years after joining the Pixies, and 35 years after starting the Breeders with Wiggs, Tanya Donelly, Carrie Bradley and Britt Walford? Well, she wanted to do a solo record 29 years ago, once the Breeders went on hiatus after Lollapalooza in ‘94. “People were tired, so they were taking time off,” she says. “Jim [Macpherson] left his drums downstairs, I had a four-track and I was beginning to write songs, knowing that these weren’t going to be Breeders songs.” Kim sent demos to 4AD’s Ivo Watts-Russell and then she and Macpherson started filling out the rhythm sections together, making what would become a record called Pacer that the Breeder defectors released as the Amps.

But the origins of Nobody Loves You More date back to 2013, when Kim wrote, recorded and released a string of non-album singles and put out “Wish I Was” and “Are You Mine?” back-to-back. She admits to having worked on the record “all through the ‘10s” until “Last Biker Gone” became the last 7-inch in 2016. Soon after, she and the Breeders went into the studio to make All Nerve and she took the previously-released “Walking with a Killer” in with her. You’d think it was difficult, choosing which songs belonged on All Nerve and which needed to remain Kim Deal solo efforts, but remember what Wiggs told Kim years ago: “Absolutely not.” “I do not think she would like a horn,” she says. “Maybe she would! After our last headline show we did in Denver and, as we were driving in the van from the venue to the hotel after the show, we heard ‘Coast’ come on the radio. It was such a time, to be able to hear that with them in the car. And they were so stoked! They were telling me how good it sounded on the radio. Josephine was like, ‘Kim, this sounds really good on the radio. It sounds excellent.’ So, maybe she would have liked the horn section. She seemed to like it in the van.”

In 2019, Kim, Kelley and Macpherson went to Mike Montgomery’s Candyland Studios in Dayton, Kentucky to demo tracks for an eventual Breeders record. She admits that “Disobedience” probably should’ve been a Breeders song, but then the pandemic hit and studios shut down—including Albini’s Electrical Audio in Chicago—and their sixth full-length album never came. But having that downtime set the wheels in motion for Kim and for Nobody Loves You More. “I got ProTools and just—did you do anything interesting during the pandemic? Did you write a book, or did you just smoke pot the whole time?” she asks me. “I wrote a book, and I moved to a new city,” I reply. “Maybe that would be the answer,” she concludes. “But, at the same time, things were coming together. When you get to the end of something, it kind of snowballs a little faster. It got quicker as more things gelled, and then it really snowballed when I was waiting around to record these songs.”

During lockdown, “Crystal Breath” was written to be a theme song for Physical, an Apple TV+ show about a “viscious, ambitious” aerobics instructor looking for self-discovery in 1980 or 1981 (“I remember that period of time”), but it ultimately got rejected. “Apple gets a hold of me and they said, ‘Do you want to do a theme song?’ And I said, ‘Do people do theme songs for TV shows now? I don’t think so. Thank you,’” she recalls. “And they go, ‘Rose Byrne is in it,’ and I go, ‘Okay, what do you need?’ I really love Rose Byrne very, very much.” After watching one of Byrne’s scenes, which featured her character looking in a mirror and calling herself a monster, Kim wrote the “My crystal breath shatters in you, the freak in my reflection sparkles into view, let’s start a new life” verse and based the track’s instrumental around a “weak disco beat” that she put into a four-track, slowed down, reversed, plugged into an amp and blew out.

When Albini’s studio finally opened back up, Kim quickly made the “super ease” (“Except for when you get to Gary—sorry, Indiana people!”) five-hour drive northwest along I-70 and I-60 to record all of the Nobody Loves You More drum parts, because she hates the way percussion sounds on ProTools. She isn’t soldering her own cables nowadays, but Nobody Loves You More still started in the same place all of her other records—Pixies, Breeders, Amps and all—have: on a tape machine, which Albini once called “a whole ball of yarn.” “I’m used to the rock sound where you’re in a room, this is how the room sounds,” she says. “The drum is an acoustic instrument and there’s space. There’s 3-D imagery, too—the drummer sitting there with the kick-drum. You’ve got your cymbals left and right, hi-hats over there. It’s hitting the wall, hitting your ears. That picture, sonically, cannot exist on ProTools, unless you create that picture on ProTools. But I’m not good enough to do that, so it’s no fun for me, anyway.”

Nobody Loves You More may have only Kim Deal’s name next to its title, but the Breeders of then and now—Macpherson, Kelley, Walford, Mando Lopez—are on it too, except for Wiggs. Mucca Pazza, a Chicago-based marching band, plays on “Coast,” and Kim used to think that they were just always performing in backyards, because the first time she ever heard them play was at Albini’s home for his 50th birthday. “When I was at Steve’s place, I said to him, ‘Hey, do you know any trumpet and trombone players you can get?’” she recalls. “He goes, ‘Mucca Pazza just came in yesterday and recorded themselves! Let me find out if a couple of them are free today.’” And Jim McBride and Chris Dixon answered the call. The Savages, Raymond McGinley of Teenage Fanclub, and ex-Red Hot Chili Pepper guitarist Josh Klinghoffer also make appearances on the record, forming such a menage of collaboration that you have to wonder what kind of separation Kim gets to have from the “band” of it all, and whether she ever really sheds that mentality or not.

For the first time in her career—except for on the back of Last Splash, where she and the band were in a car (“That was so weird that we did that”)—Kim’s face is on the cover of one of her records. “I really miss a band,” she admits. “I don’t think about covers of albums. I know some people just love it. Bob Pollard will draw covers of albums for fake bands that don’t exist. But I never really think about album covers. ‘Okay, 4AD wants to put [Nobody Loves You More] out, what’s going to be on the cover?’ I don’t know… I was super ambivalent. With the Breeders, people were going back and forth, talking about what we like, what we don’t like. Somebody has a good idea, somebody’s idea is stupid. It becomes something that I get involved in and I’m excited about. On this record, I was like, ‘What does it all mean, anway? Just make it black.’”

But 4AD wanted Kim to put herself on it, which she found to be very subversive. “Vaughan Oliver from 4AD—he’s dead, but do you know this guy?” she asks, before snickering at herself. “I know of him, but I don’t know him personally,” I say. “Right, that’s what I mean,” Kim continues. “When we first started working with him, he used to give a shit. I guess a lot of bands wanted to be on their album cover. He was saying—Newcastle upon Tyne, I cannot do that accent—‘You probably want to be on the album cover so people recognize you in the streets, don’t you?’ And we were like, ‘No, not at all. It doesn’t matter.’ If you open up Doolittle, we’re standing there with our individual shots. Was it an insert?” I walk over to my record shelf and pull the insert out of my own Doolittle copy. Nil. Google suggests it was probably Bossanova instead. “It’s funny, me talking to you about all these old artifacts, saying, ‘I think I was in the insert!’”

When Kim and I last spoke more than a year ago, she told me a story about how, when she and Mark Freeguard were producing Last Splash together, she stuck her head in a piano and put bricks on the pedals so she could do the vocals—or her how Kelley hooked her sewing machine up to a Marshall amp and put a mic on it just to get the “S.O.S.” distortion. 30 years later and Kim didn’t need to quell her weirdo desires with abstract studio experiments—Albini probably wouldn’t have let her do it anyway. “You can’t really do that stuff with Steve,” she says. “That’s my stupid idea. With Albini, he would probably have a mic and a mic technique to do that, to make it sound special—not that Mark didn’t, but I probably didn’t even ask.” The most experimental place Kim went on Nobody Loves You More was when, at Electrical Audio, she tracked drums to a scratch arrangement of keyboards, guitar, demo vocals and a click. “Playing drums along with a band that’s not there—I created the band so I could play it in my headphones. Then I’m in the band.”

Albini passed away at home in May 2024 after suffering a heart attack, just three months before Kim announced Nobody Loves You More. The record producer, audio engineer, Big Black, Rapeman, and Shellac bandleader and sometimes-music journalist worked on hundreds of records in his lifetime, but his career behind the boards took off with Kim in the room. He helmed the engineering on the Pixies’ debut album Surfer Rosa in 1988, a move that would land him production credits (that he didn’t ask for) on releases by the Jesus Lizard, Slint (where he was credited as “some fuckin’ derd niffer”), Hum, PJ Harvey, Nirvana, Smog and Bush across the next decade.

Kim talks about Albini in both the present-tense and the past-tense. His passing is still fresh not just for her, but for so many of us—especially as some of his final projects, like Nobody Loves You More and FACS’ Wish Defense, are still coming out. The record has already crash-landed on streaming services at my time of writing this, and its existence is unthinkably perfect. These 11 songs are timeless and, as is the case with anyone who makes music without expiration dates, their makers will forever linger within them. I ask Kim what made Albini the guy who could best capture all the things that she was hearing in her head and all the things she wanted this record to say, and her response is simple: “All the headphone boxes work.”

She continues: “When I bring in Kel, Jo and Jim, he goes on autopilot. He knows how to record a band. Otherwise, it would take forever. When it’s just me, I drive up on my own, walk in and sit down in Control Room A. He goes, ‘What are we doing today, Kim?’ ‘I need to play drums.’ ‘Okay, what room do you want to put it in?’ ‘I think we should go in the Kentucky room.’ With the solo stuff, he was just wide open. Nothing was harried. We ended up doing the first take [of ‘Summerland’] on tape, because we’re still at Steve’s place, and we’re listening to it and going, ‘Yeah, that sounds right.’ Steve goes, ‘Well, I don’t see why we would do another one!’ He’s good because he knows what he’s doing and he’s confident.”

Kim brings up the letters that Albini would get from aspiring musicians wanting to get better at recording, like the one a still-green player from Champaign-Urbana, and how he would respond with in-depth, easy to digest pieces of advice. “If somebody who really knows what they’re doing and really can use words to explain it to you without making things complicated or a word salad—that’s why he’s good, that’s why he was easy to work with.” Albini once said “find people who think like you and stick with them,” and he maintained a near-40-year partnership with Kim, working on Pod, Title TK, Mountain Battles, Fate to Fatal and All Nerve and even some of those non-album singles 10 years ago. The recording of their last song together, “A Good Time Pushed,” wrapped up in 2022 and Kim’s lyrics fill the space like a goodbye: “We’re having a good time, I’ll see you around.” For as long as we have her and for as long as we have Nobody Loves You More, we will still have Albini with us, in the touch of his friendliness and his sensational professionalism. “He just treats everybody with such respect,” Kim says. “And everybody has a seat. They know where they’re going.”

All of Nobody Loves You More is good, but Kim is at her best on “Are You Mine?” In 2002, she checked into rehab for help with drug and alcohol abuse and, upon leaving the Hazelden clinic in Minnesota later that year, she found out that her mother was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. She would move back to Dayton and live with her parents, keeping the Gem City as her home base when she’d go out on Breeders tours, reunite with the Pixies and stick with them until 2011, where she went from bandleader to caretaker while her mom’s condition continued to erode. When she wrote “Are You Mine?” more than a decade ago, her mom was alive but the person Kim had become was “really hurt inside,” as she was still living at home and looking after both of her parents near the end of their lives. “I’m using the word ‘hurt’ in a weird way,” she clarifies. “It becomes this weird, horrible, tear-shaped bubble that’s just sitting in my stomach—or soul, because it feels like that. It’s a sad feeling. You know, at the same time, there is a…” She trails off, taking a beat before letting out a defeated “I don’t know.”

I feel every ounce of that “I don’t know.” I find myself returning often to the writing that I did when my grandmother was at the end of her life, nine years after her dementia diagnosis, and I’m always surprised by what I learn from that version of myself—a person who, after slowly grieving her death and watching parts of herself grow unrecognizable, felt guilty for feeling better after she finally passed away. I was no longer an 18-year-old taking care of an 85-year-old cutting cardboard boxes up into tiny pieces or slowly starving herself to death. But I eventually understood the release that comes with that, and it took years to get there. “They say that, as long as they feel love and they feel safe, that’s all that matters,” Kim says. “So, that’s what we always tried to take it to—‘Is she loved? Is she safe? Does she feel loved? Does she feel safe?’ But, she had it for a long time, man, and she plateaued slowly.”

A year after her dad died, Kim’s mom passed away at home in February 2020, right before COVID-19 hit the United States. “It just sits there like a water drop coming off of a roof. It just sits there and it doesn’t drip down,” she says of watching her mom’s condition worsen slowly. “But [‘Are You Mine?’] is easier for me to listen to now. I just think, ‘Oh, doesn’t the pedal steel sound great? I really like how this is going.’ The original had a lost guitar track—a 388 Tascam thing, consumer grade recording equipment losing sound. Now, this version sounds complete.”

Kim Deal, ever the elusive artist who sometimes goes years without ever having a single world published, couldn’t be more relevant in 2024. Her bass playing in the Pixies inspired thousands, maybe millions of girls to pick up four-strings of their own. Last Splash, thanks to MTV keeping the “Cannonball” and “Divine Hammer” music videos in heavy rotation, remains a cultural tempest and beloved by folks who saw the Breeders open for Nirvana and Olivia Rodrigo’s fandom all the same. But she’s still that teenaged Dayton kid playing cover songs on a Yamaha keyboard at the Ground Round and using her grandpa’s toilet seat as a piano stand. After her parents’ deaths four years ago, their house was knocked down because it sat on top of a culvert. Kim would eventually start spending time down in the Florida Keys, a place her father especially adored. “Are You Mine?,” a song affected by kin receding further apart from each other, can now be reclaimed as a love song, or as a grounding siren of possibility after death—as Kim sings “let me go where there’s no memory of you, where everything is new and nothing is true” to all who need every syllable.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.