“Time is a strange thing/Forgotten a lot but I remember some things,” Bnny’s Jessica Viscius sings on the opening track of her second album, One Million Love Songs. The song is called “Missing,” and she’s recounting the whimsical first stages of falling in love. Her voice starts off breathy, fragile, and slightly hesitant, like she’s finally coming up for air, before the guitars and drums distend and twinkle, creating an entire snowglobe-like world in the span of just under two minutes. Then, as if on cue, the instruments bow out to give Viscius room to utter the quiet part loud: “When I’m with you, I almost forget that he’s missing.”
Viscius sees “Missing” as marking a transition from Bnny’s first album, 2021’s Everything, which she wrote in the wake of the death of her partner and fellow musician Trey Gruber. If that album was a vessel for immense grief, the new one shows how loving again can feel like both muscle memory and nothing short of a miracle.
“Obviously, when I wrote Everything, that was a very dark time in my life,” the Chicago-based musician says. “This album to me is much lighter and sort of a new era of Bnny.” The loss that inspired the first album, she continues, “was sort of rock bottom. Nothing can be as bad as that experience. So although I might be going through a really painful breakup now or something, it’s like I can look at it in a different light. I’ll keep moving on and writing more love songs.”
Loving after loss, trying (and failing) to outrun the past, placing yourself in the perilous position to get hurt again, and again, and again…Viscius explores it all without shame on One Million Love Songs. In conversation and by listening to the record, it’s clear that her capacity for love is massive. “I still remember the first time that it felt real to love again, to feel,” she sings on lead single “Good Stuff.” The song’s chorus feels like a promise to herself, and a thesis statement to the album: “I’m hanging on to my big love.” Over a lead guitar line on the jammy “Something Blue,” she admits that “Lately I’ve been dreaming about everyone I’ve loved.” “I’ve never felt safe like this,” she sings on the dreamy “Changes,” before noting she’s so happy she could scream – and then does.
“What is life without love?” she says when I ask what makes it all worth it for her. “I feel like love is the life force, so it’s worth it to risk everything for love.”
Much has been made of the “lover girl” sensibility online. There are endless arbitrary debates on who can be deemed a “real yearner” versus a “fake” one. They all serve to emphasize pretty much the same point: that the act of unabashedly loving someone can often be severely humbling, if not near-humiliating. It’s certainly not the safest way to operate, if the goal is to keep your dignity fully intact. Viscius has described her new album as “having fun with a broken heart”: “I’ve kind of conceded to the fact that I just write love songs, despite trying to write about other things,” she says. “When you write a love song, it seems so certain and so sure at times, but love is often so fleeting and there are no guarantees in anything. You just have to keep trucking along.”

That lightness on One Million Love Songs extends beyond thematics: Several of the songs on this record are louder, the guitar riffs looser and more blown-out, the rhythms more urgent. Her signature ballads still make appearances with songs like “Sweet,” a waltzy tune that showcases the sly confidence that can pop up in the throes of budding romance: “I’m so sweet/Don’t you wanna get to know me?” Lyrically, Bnny’s songs are direct and uncomplicated. “I don’t really think much about the lyrics, which is maybe why they are so simple and so honest,” she says. “It’s just like how I’m feeling in that moment, in that hour, in that minute I’m writing a particular song. I don’t make voice memos or record things when I’m writing — I’ll know it’s a good song if I remember it the next day.”
Viscius recorded One Million Love Songs over the course of two weeks in Asheville, North Carolina with co-producer Alex Farrar, who she chose as a collaborator in part because of his work with acts like Wednesday and MJ Lenderman. “We’ve got soft pop songs, but then there’s also some rock moments,” she says. Recording in that environment was a “totally novel experience” for Viscius, who writes mostly in isolation, at nighttime, with a beer or two in her bedroom. Bringing those songs to others can be slightly nerve-wracking, she says.
Her bandmates — anchored by her twin sister Alexa on bass, along with Alexa’s husband on guitar and “a drummer, who’s usually revolving” — joined her for about half of the time in Asheville. Alexa, who is also a photographer, shot the album cover for One Million Love Songs — a vibrant, candid photo of Viscius laying on a field backdropped by snowcapped mountains — while the sisters were hiking in Alaska. “I love the connection of the two albums,” Jessica notes. “The first album, Everything, is me shrouded in darkness with my back facing the camera. This one has a lighter feel — I’m relaxed, playing in nature. They tie together in that way.”
The morning of my conversation with Viscius, a piece titled “The Desire Question” is generating discussion in certain social media circles. The essay features more than 60 people answering the same question: “Is it better to desire, or be desired?” I figure Viscius, the self-proclaimed arbiter of love songs, might have some thoughts, so I turn the question to her. “I mean, for art, I think it’s better to desire,” she says. “It makes for better songwriting. In my personal life, it would be nicer to be desired. True, honest, good love is, I think, a mix of the two. Both sides. And that’s why it’s so rare.”
That rare quality might explain why we spend an embarrassingly large fraction of our lives trying to cradle (and maybe suffocate) whatever tenderness we do experience, out of the fear that it might be taken away. Viscius takes us on this journey with her on One Million Love Songs, from the blur of euphoria to disappointment, and the commitment to letting love change your heart even if someone else decides to change their mind.
It’s only fitting that the album ends the way we hate to admit most relationships do. On the defiant and resigned “No One,” Viscius gently plucks a guitar while repeating, “No one loves me anymore.” “It was this moment of self-pity and being like, ‘No one loves me and I’m trying to change and nothing’s working,’” she says. “But in the same way, it was finding acceptance that that’s OK.”















Drake onstage in Toronto last year
Everybody Likes Drake Again. That Means We’re Healing
Not to be dramatic or anything, but not too long ago, listening to people talk about Drake, you’d think he would never top the charts again. But here we are: With Iceman, he’s broken his own record, earning a 13th week atop Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart on Sept. 5, surpassing Take Care’s 12-week run more than a decade ago. The achievement comes after the great rap civil war of 2024, which was framed as everything from a referendum on Drake’s character as a human being to a cleansing of what popular radio host Ebro would describe, in February 2025, as “a sickness in the game.”
Again, not trying to be dramatic, but even if you were skeptical of the discourse circa 2024, it is a bit shocking to hear the public’s recent re-embrace of Drake. Consider how far the frenzy around the most salacious allegations on Kendrick Lamar‘s “Not Like Us” extended. There was Christopher Alvarez, a disabled journalist, being dragged into conspiracy theories. There was the woman from the resurfaced concert footage, now 31, having to publicly dispute the creepy significance strangers had assigned to an onstage kiss from when she was 17. Drake said in his lawsuit against UMG that the threats had forced him to pull his seven-year-old son out of school.
What now feels like the absurdity of the moment registered as something deathly serious at the time. By September 2024, Lamar was releasing the ominous “Watch the Party Die,” just days after his Super Bowl halftime performance was announced. Oh, also, a major talking point in American culture a year and a half ago was whether one of the biggest superstars in the world would be publicly branded a pedophile during the Super Bowl.
In what world would any celebrity recover from that?
Except, with time, the online frenzy surrounding the Drake and Lamar feud reads more like a mass-psychosis event than a cultural reckoning. The music, oddly enough, often seemed secondary to the certainty of everyone discussing it. “Not Like Us” was a veritable hit, absolutely. But its cultural dominance became bound up in a widespread vilification of Drake that curdled online, where the most damning interpretation of anything could quickly become the accepted one. For a while, even putting on a Drake song could feel like something you had to explain, as if listening amounted to taking a position on the allegations.
That this all happened in 2024 is meaningful. This was right in the peak of Elon Musk’s reconstruction of Twitter, privileging rage bait and engagement tactics that helped misinformation disseminate like fact. It was also the beginning of AI tools becoming sophisticated enough to produce convincing-sounding tracks. Even before Drake released his first response, “Push Ups,” AI-generated response tracks were circulating across social media. And so, in many ways, the well of public opinion was already poisoned.
Listeners’ recent embrace of Drake feels settled in a broader cultural shift brewing since 2024. The beef, in hindsight, feels like a dying vestige of whatever people want to call “Woke 1.0”: a particular faith that exposing the right person could amount to a cultural transformation. For a moment, defeating Drake seemed to promise something about the future of hip-hop, about who would belong in it and what it would tolerate.
There were obvious holes in the argument, namely who exactly these arbiters of culture were and why they were uniquely qualified to speak for the entirety of Black people, questions that Drake pokes at on “Ran to Atlanta” from Iceman. Still, these were never even supposed to be binding philosophical truths in the first place. To hear levelheaded commentators discuss it, this was all simply entertainment — two of the genre’s greats duking it out. Even one of the beef’s catalysts, Metro Boomin, echoed the sentiment, lamenting how online fans had turned the battle into something sinister. Hell, even Jay-Z said something similar before himself tossing a few jabs at Drizzy in a freestyle at the Roots Picnic this year. But the artists themselves supplied the allegations. The ability to raise those stakes and then retreat into “simply entertainment” was part of the dynamic, too.
Even so, how it all devolved into a pseudocultural reckoning says more about the environment fans exist in today than it does about either Drake or Lamar. In the years around the beef, shocking revelations about Diddy as well as the global elite’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein have become folded into the background, alongside a sense that accountability remains selective. This atmosphere of collective powerlessness offers one explanation for the conspiratorial thinking at the heart of Lamar versus Drake. A frustration with an increasingly degraded world and dwindling resources to change it means outrage can mobilize an enormous number of people very quickly, with little holding them together once the moment passes.
The language of exploitation and cultural extraction gave the battle a purpose that seemed to extend well beyond either rapper. But even if you took the least charitable opinion imaginable of our Canadian hitmaker, what was supposed to happen after Drake was defeated? The industry whose supposed wickedness Drake allegedly embodied carried on selling the spectacle itself.
What everyone was caught up in was an appetite with a longer history than the social media platforms now feeding it. Lance Oppenheim’s new film, Primetime, returns to Chris Hansen and To Catch a Predator, a television format that made public humiliation feel like a public service. The connection is in the experience offered to the audience. The viewer could enjoy the confrontation with the reassuring sense that watching served some larger good. Never mind if anything that was unfolding on screen amounted to justice.
In the historian Anton Jäger’s book-length essay Hyperpolitics, published earlier this year in English, he describes how the past decade’s surge of political feeling has coincided with a continuing withdrawal from communal life. More isolated digital environments can fuel extraordinary mobilization without the actual community organizations that might turn it into something tangible. Negating Drake, then, became a gesture in itself. A means of signaling a broader dissatisfaction with the direction of hip-hop culture. Where the problems extend to technology and the demoralizing margins of streaming music, for a while it felt good for people to just wrap it all up in one word: Drake.
But on Iceman, it’s hard to take the idea of Drake as an evil force within hip-hop very seriously, even as he himself makes an effort to lean into the role of the villain. Drake’s music is most potent when it’s aimed at the masses, even if he swears his nice-guy days are over. This is the Degrassi kid turned global superstar rivaling Taylor Swift, after all.
Now, with Fear of Missing Out, Drake’s cryptically announced project slated for release this week, we’ve entered a second kind of Drake Renaissance. However delusional it seems, there was a moment when it felt somehow wrong to play Drake. His return to the top of the charts suggests a good deal of people were eager to get back to listening.