“Check my bank account for the first time in weeks / Mom calls and tells me she’s worried” — how familiar does that sound? Twin Princess nails the troubled-kid-in-the-city narrative with a mere two lines in “Allston,” a magnetic pop-rock brush with one woman’s follies in Rat City. The Philadelphia project of Pauli Mia dropped the new track last week (April 14), revealing the first destination on her forthcoming LP Blood Moon, due out May 26.
“‘Allston’ traces my reflections on leaving Boston, a city I’d spent several years in and where I’d made many poor decisions,” Mia shares. “It’s part nostalgia for these terrible choices – the fondness you feel for a younger self who can’t stop losing her keys or her debit card because she’s going to spend the night in places she shouldn’t. It’s also part exasperation and desperation to finally escape to the fantasy that won’t ever be fulfilled, of leaving somewhere and somehow not taking yourself with you.”
“Allston” is the sound of Mia’s past whirring by in all its sophomoric glory, observed from the bike path that runs alongside memory lane. As she pedals through days gone by, Mia presents the neighborhood as a halfway point: The place between a grin and a grimace, between naïveté and street smarts, and between dreams and reality.
“I knew I’d end up like this,” she laments on the chorus, resignation lurking in her tone. And yet Allston — the song and the ‘hood — pulls us in, time and time again.
Breeze through “Allston” below.