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Genre:

Rock

Label:

Sub Pop

Release Date:

2026

Lex Walton operates on the extremes of hope and despair; from the outside, it just seems like irony. She will reference cult director Vincent Gallo (as “Vinny Gallo”) and Owl City’s childlike 2009 hit “Fireflies” on the same EP. Her song titles, like “In This House, We Don’t Call the Cops; We Call Chosen Family” and “Preteen on Omegle Blues,” can be off-putting. Walton is prolific and, among a certain Brooklyn trans scene, ubiquitous—aside from appearing in lo-fi trans anthology series Castration Movie, she’s the bassist in Prairie Princess, and this summer, aided the band’s lead singer Emerson Borakove in staging Airy Foist at a Geese set. Her solo songs are anything from keyboard demos to 12-minute blown-out opuses. For Car Seat Headrest fans who remember Will Toledo’s pre-Matador days, the trajectory will be familiar, but Walton’s output is much more confrontational.

A lot of Walton’s music feels intentionally incomprehensible, whether you grew up on the internet and then moved to Brooklyn or not; it initially kept me, a New York-based trans person of Tumblr experience, at arm’s length with its hyperlexic musings. If ever a Bandcamp page needed a glossary, it would be Walton’s account. Yet when Walton surprise-released Ultimate Love Forever last week, I understood exactly what she was going for, specifically on the lyric, “Dressed in the uniform of the verbose/At the end of the world, so it goes.” Walton’s verbosity is armor against a world quite literally surveilling trans people’s every move; the terminally online lingo masks real grief. On her Sub Pop debut, the armor comes off, as Walton departs Bushwick interpersonal dynamics for wider societal ills. She puts her wordiness to good use, updating millennial optimism for an age of loneliness and bitterness.

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“Hipster Runoff” discusses the collapse of this idealism, as represented by Occupy Wall Street and Kony 2012, and by extension the failure of Gen Z to become the world’s saviors instead. (Not an easy task for anyone: Phil Collins, in the ’80s, promised “my generation will put it right,” and that definitely did not happen either.) On this song, Walton tries to recapture that early sense of possibility: Co-producing alongside Wolf Parade’s Dan Boeckner, Walton endearingly shouts out his old band when she sings, “What do I know? I’ll believe in anything.” As ever, she’s referential, but with added resources she can afford to be surprisingly reverential, indulging in the chance to make a ’00s indie record: Sarah Neufeld of Arcade Fire contributes characteristically harmonic-laden strings to two songs, including the penultimate “Adrian Borland Will Have His Revenge on London.” Listen closely to that one, and you’ll hear triumphant “woah-ohs,” a battle cry of early 21st century sincerity buried in distortion.

The added production value uncovers the earnestness that was always there. Compare last year’s single version of “I Wish I Was an M80” to the album, and the final recording is much more dynamic. The vocals are louder, too, revealing that as much as she tries to hide it, Walton can put together a hook-driven indie rock song. Closer “Ultimate Love 4Ever” has an almost off-Broadway-style intro (“Why shouldn’t we all just kill ourselves? Isn’t there anything better out there?” “Uh… well, yeah! Let me tell you…”) and launches into a straightforward, purposefully naive rocker that reveals the core longing beneath all of the references and anger: “I want an island of everyone I’ve ever loved,” and “I’m so tired of crying/I’m so tired of being alone.”

She never loses sight of the bigger picture. “Yr Op-Ed Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” a reference to John Prine, rails against the publications that moved the goalposts on acceptable bigotry. Walton told Chapo Trap House that the song is partially aimed at journalist Jesse Singal, whose think-about-the-children story for The Atlantic in 2018 famously took cover space over a headline reading “We’re Not Prepared for the Next Pandemic.” After years of outcry to no avail, it’s cathartic to hear someone just deadpan “Go fuck yourself” while trading measures with abrasive glitches. Frenetic standout “USA = FAG NATION” is the most unhinged track on the record, proving that a big indie co-producer and label only gave Walton license for more mayhem: dueling noise guitars from Alice Cohen and Geese’s Emily Green, heavily overdriven percussion, and a chant that “some people should be shot/The world would be a better place if different people got shot,” no hedging required. (Walton hedges anyway, sampling Dimes Square-adjacent comedian Ivy Wolk mocking the empty threat of violence from “pink-haired nonbinary bitches.”)

Ultimate Love Forever is a more-than-worthy snapshot of being alive at this specific point in time, and not just if you’re trans; no matter who or where you are in America right now, it can feel like everything is eroding at once, and this is a fitting soundtrack. Walton’s liner notes are characteristically verbose on the subject: “Our moment dextrorotatory”—that means directed to the right—“we will persist through comphet survival tactics and sun damaged prophylactics until they pass the law that lets the doctors let us kill ourselves and make our parents foot a 1000 thousand dollar bill.” Should this statement be taken seriously? Who knows. But as with everything else on this record, it comes from an authentic place.

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