I want to push for the idea that a record doesn’t have to mean something. That the point of music isn’t always to decode it and extract meaning from it. That music can be emotionally legible without being confessional. And that distortion and opacity—a sensation of watching someone on the other side of an artificial waterfall in a family buffet restaurant—is often far more interesting and resonant than saying explicitly what one means.

From A Record Doesn’t Have to Mean Something by Sophie Kemp (h/t Clone)