Holding Hands with Ghosts That Don’t Text Back

The Exquisite Poetic Sadness of Penny Ash and Softcore Revelations

Penny Ash makes music like someone trying to smuggle a diary out of a fire.

That is the first thing to say about Softcore Revelations, the strange, difficult-to-categorize project Ash has used to turn poems, confessionals, erotic wreckage, friendship elegies and little acts of self-mockery into songs that often sound less “written” than exhaled.

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Softcore Revelations belongs, maybe, to the old freak-folk lineage if you need a genre tag badly enough to embarrass yourself. But that label only gets you so far. Freak folk usually implies rootsiness, whimsy, some recognizable pastoral weirdness. Penny is weirder than that and more urban in her ruin. Her songs feel less like woodland artifacts than motel scriptures, thrift-store psalms, text messages from the far side of a panic attack. They are almost algorithm-proof by design: too literary for pure indie-pop, too intimate for alt-folk, too sonically inconsistent to behave like a brand. That appears to be part of the frustration and part of the point.

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This review of *SCR 3* gets at one essential truth: the arrangements do not submit to a single governing aesthetic, but synths and familiar musical reference points serve as emotional bait, little recognitions that lower your guard so Ash’s lyrics can get in deeper. The review describes “Lube of My Resistance” as Björk-adjacent experimental electronics and hears 1950s teen-dance innocence curdling inside “Rain, Rain, I Love Your Sound,” with later turns into trap textures, twee power-pop and spectral farewells. It also notes the album’s riot-grrrl-adjacent ethos: music made mainly by women, about women, while remaining open to anyone willing to listen.

That sounds right. But it also undersells how naked this material is. Penny Ash is not just making “eclectic” music. She is making anti-defensive music. Even when she is arch, even when she is funny, even when she hides behind camp or overripe metaphor, the point is never to protect herself fully. She wants to be caught in the act of feeling.

This is why Ruinable and SCR 3, the two releases from 2026, feel less like separate releases than like companion breakdowns in adjacent rooms. *Ruinable* is the more aphoristic, poem-forward record, the one that reduces whole romantic disasters into devastating little crystallizations. “There are girls who become stone / when the world presses too hard,” she writes, before delivering the project’s thesis statement: “once, a man said i was ‘ruinable’ / and i’ve been trying to prove him right ever since.” That is a brutal line because it is self-accusing without becoming self-cleansing. It does not flatter the speaker for her damage. It catches her collaborating with it.

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That collaboration with damage is everywhere in Penny’s writing. In “Didn’t Say It Loud,” desire, coercion, vanity and self-deception fuse into a single glamorously ugly knot: “I told myself I chose it. Said it proud. / But really? I just didn’t say it loud.” In “At Least You Got to Know,” the voice turns colder and more openly vengeful, moving from sexual humiliation to artistic retaliation with a line that could summarize Ash’s whole method: “you took my mouth and tried to rename it yours / I took that night and gave it rhythm.” That is Penny in miniature. Violation becomes form. Embarrassment becomes meter. The wound gets a hook.

But the music would be unbearable if that were all it could do. What saves Softcore Revelations from becoming one more self-mythologizing sad-girl art object is that Ash knows shame is not the only weather worth tracking. In the interview material, she says she keeps returning to “desire as projection,” to shame as a kind of stylist, to friendship, beauty, exile and the body as rumor. Most revealingly, she says that friendship has rescued her life “in ways sex never did,” and that she has increasingly realized friendship is often the real love story.

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That shift matters. It helps explain why some of the most affecting lyrics in the Ruinable packet are not about erotic undoing at all. “Oklahoma Softness (In Defense of Hot Girls Who Heal)” reads like a thank-you note written from the edge of a relapse into melodrama, praising the friend who “calls my chaos art, / but also charges cover at the door.” It is funny, grateful, and quietly profound. Penny Ash is a writer of longing, yes, but increasingly also a writer of the people who keep longing from becoming a religion of self-harm.

The other thing that keeps Softcore Revelations alive is humor. Not joke-writing, exactly, but the humor of someone who knows that her own theatricality is part of the problem. In the interview, Ash says she likes “the first fake version” of a song least: the tasteful, legible draft written for an imagined listener, the one edited in advance for public consumption. The real work is getting to the messier version underneath. That is one of the best descriptions of her art I can imagine. Penny’s songs do not aim for tasteful confession. They aim for the embarrassing line that turns out to be the load-bearing one. She would rather sound slightly ridiculous than dead.

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That instinct gives SCR 3 its best songs. “Sad Girl Summer” is built out of glitter, jelly shoes, cherry Pepsi, ghosting and cartoon trouble, but beneath all the bratty surface detail is a ruthless account of romantic disposability and feminine self-performance. “Rain, Rain, I Love Your Sound” turns weather into permission, with rain functioning as the rare witness that does not look away from the messy girl in the cloud of her own sadness. And “If I Go,” the likely farewell to the project, is devastating because it shrinks rather than swells. Ash says she wanted it to sound like a goodbye the speaker does not fully trust, delivered in a smaller, more exposed, under-arranged form. She describes leaving Los Angeles as realizing she was becoming “a beautiful caption for a person instead of a person,” and says the song drags her own mythology “by the ankle,” affectionately but unsparingly.

That may be the key to Penny Ash. She is a mythology addict with enough self-awareness to know the myth is starving her. She romanticizes, then becomes suspicious of the romance. She writes like someone caught between wanting to be chosen and wanting to escape the entire theater of being chosen. In the interview, she describes herself beautifully: “my music is me with the lighting adjusted and the silences mic’d properly.” That is Softcore Revelations in one sentence. Not documentary truth, but emotionally accurate truth under flattering light.

The presence of Lacey Lune in this orbit matters because she connects Penny to a wider underground ecology of stylized feeling: Anton Donovan’s noir-pop intelligence, Nada UV’s ghostly glamour, Battle Bumps’ funk-mutant playfulness. But Penny is the raw nerve in that network. The others shape moods. She bleeds through them.

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If SCR 3 really is the end of Softcore Revelations, as Ash hints, it ends exactly where it should: in unresolved gratitude, theatrical honesty and a refusal to tidy the mess into an arc of healing. Softcore Revelations was never “content.” It was a poetry-delivery system for someone too porous to survive ordinary speech. Ash says she has tried being normal and it makes her feel like “a haunted beige lamp.” Good. Let the lamp stay haunted. Let the algorithms choke on it.