Off-Menu: Burning at Both Ends

Content note: This album deals directly with suicidal ideation, particularly tracks one and seven. 988 is available 24/7. Take care of yourself first.

I came to this sideways.

Mid-40s. Fully marinated in the era when every white dude with an acoustic guitar was running the Dashboard Confessional playbook into the ground. Dorm rooms. Coffee shop open mics. That guy at the party who needed you to really listen to this one. You know the guy. You might’ve been the guy. I might’ve been the guy. The confessional singer-songwriter thing wasn’t a subculture. It was the weather.

A connection got me early access to Hit Like a Girl’s fifth LP, and the timing felt right for reasons I couldn’t explain until I’d listened three times through.

Nicolle Maroulis (they/them) has been making records since 2017. They run No More Dysphoria, a nonprofit helping trans people afford transition — funded through merch sales at DIY shows, because that’s how you do it when nobody’s writing grants for you. Philadelphia scene kid. Show up, pay dues, build things with your hands.

I’m not from that world. But Burning at Both Ends doesn’t check membership cards. Just: have you felt something, lost something, kept going anyway?

Yeah. Same.

Eight tracks. Twenty-seven minutes. Every song earns its place.

Opens with someone lying in cold dying grass while the narrator’s at the store buying their favorite sweets, oblivious. Closes with the narrator receiving mail for someone who’ll never read it. Between those points: polyamory betrayal specific enough to use the word “metamour,” a friendship that dies when someone moves to the West Coast to find themselves (meditating or whatever), and the kind of mental health spiral where you start planning who’ll watch your cat.

Heavy. But the songs move. There’s a propulsive quality even in the darkest stuff — the only way out is through, keep walking.

Track one: you’re watching someone else’s crisis unfold. Track seven: the crisis has migrated inward. The album teaches you to watch for signs in others, then reveals the person you should’ve been watching was yourself.

This is a record where the tracklist matters. Remember when artists used to wrestle with sequencing? What comes next, what’s the arc, where do you land the listener? Streaming playlists and shuffle buttons have mostly killed that instinct. But someone sat with these eight songs and thought about the journey — crisis to betrayal to tenderness to anger to collapse to grief. You’re supposed to take it in order. It rewards you for staying.

Press materials say: midwest emo, synth pop, hardcore. Sure. But that’s like describing a cocktail by listing the spirit categories.

Track one opens with steel guitar and ambient wind. That’s Tim McGraw territory. “Please Don’t Take the Girl” energy. Old country is just emo with a twang anyway — feelings too big for talking, set to a melody you can carry in your truck.

Track two kicks in with rockabilly tremolo, then dissolves into noise. There’s a synth line on track three that would’ve killed on Guitar Hero circa 2007. Track four’s keyboard wash could score a John Hughes film if John Hughes made films about queer people begging partners to just say it already.

Producer Matt Schimelfenig and Jacob Blizard (Lucy Dacus, Illuminati Hotties) give this thing sonic range that keeps it from feeling like one long song. It’s not a genre exercise. It’s: here’s the feeling, what sound does it need? — and assuming your ear knows how to follow.

Here’s the trick that makes this work physically: two vocal approaches, running simultaneous or in sequence. One singing. One screaming.

The scream is release. The singing is trying to hold it together. When they happen at the same time — that’s the reality of being a person. Falling apart and functioning. Both at once.

For those of us who grew up screaming along to songs that weren’t built for screaming — willing the Indigo Girls to be louder than they were, adding catharsis to someone else’s melody — there’s something generous here. The scream is built into the architecture. You’re not doing it alone. The song shows you where to let go.

And look: Maroulis is thirty-eight. They know you can’t scream for twenty-seven minutes. The clean passages let you breathe. Rest stops on a highway heading somewhere dark. Songs built for people who want to feel everything and also survive feeling it.

“Metamour” shows up in the third verse of track three. No explanation. Either you know it means your partner’s other partner, or you figure it out, or it washes over you. Maroulis isn’t here to educate. They’re here to describe what it feels like watching your partner teach someone else your songs while you leave the room.

Specificity runs throughout. Mom’s kitchen table the ex might still have. Joshua Tree hike where promises got made. Gemstones and tarot cards on the mantle next to the funeral collage. Details aren’t decorative. They’re evidence. This happened. This exact thing.

There’s a High Fidelity moment in track three. You know the scene — Rob Gordon is making a mixtape for another woman and his girlfriend walks in. Nobody’s undressed. Nobody’s yelling. But everyone in the room knows what it means. The look on his face is the whole confession.

Track three has that moment:

Remember when you taught me all your old songs
And one day I caught you teaching them to him
I’ll never forget the look on your face
That was when I knew I’d been replaced.”

Not cheating. Not fighting. Just: oh. This is where your attention actually is. And you both know it now.

What surprised me: the specificity makes it more accessible. I’ve never had a metamour. Never been exiled from a DIY scene. But I’ve watched someone struggle and not known how to help. Had friendships end badly. Sat with objects that belonged to someone who isn’t coming back.

Particular unlocks universal. Confessional songwriting has always known this. Maroulis is just working with materials the genre hasn’t always had access to — or been willing to name.

The phrase traces back to Black poet Toi Derricotte, through Audre Lorde, into ACT UP during the AIDS crisis. Simple idea: when systems want you dead or diminished, your capacity for pleasure and connection is defiance.

Maroulis runs No More Dysphoria. They know the statistics on trans suicide. They made an album with a song called “Romanticize” that asks how many ways a person can romanticize ending their own life.

But the album also has “Are You in Love” — synth-pop patience and hope. Has “Keepsake Theory” — crying through a concert and staying anyway. Joy and crisis coexist. They have to.

There’s a moment in track two: two people at a show, singing along to the same song, both using it to grieve the same relationship. They might know the other one’s there. Doesn’t matter. They’re both still singing. Crying. Alive.

Crying and singing are the same thing.

That might be the whole review.

Final track: “Funeral Collage.” Exactly what it sounds like.

Someone’s gone. Mail still arrives. The dog doesn’t understand. Narrator hasn’t touched their guitar in months — might still carry the touch.

The voice goes lo-fi at the end. Answering machine quality. Something preserved but degrading. Past reaching into present.

Last image: eventually, put the belongings in the garage. Wipe dust off the funeral collage. Not healing. Continuing. Maybe continuing is healing. Move the objects. Keep the dog. Go outside.

Emo done well can take it out of you. This one took it out of me. I gutted it out, took notes on my computer, and came out the other side a little hollowed.

But that’s the point. Genre exists because some feelings are too big for talking, too complicated for crying. Only option left: make it into something with a beat you can move to.

Hit Like a Girl made something you can move to. It’ll cost you. You’ll get through it.

Now if you’ll excuse me — vitamin D. Touch grass. The alive kind.

Burning at Both Ends is out now on Cryptid Records.

Hit Like a Girl tours through spring 2026. Dates include Silk City (Philadelphia), Pouzza Fest (Montreal), and — for those keeping score at home — Midwest Friends Fest in Newport, KY.

For more on No More Dysphoria: nomoredysphoria.org

If you made it through: what landed for you? Hit reply or drop a comment. This is Off-Menu #2, and I’m still figuring out what belongs here.