by Jade Marantz (@jade.marantz)
With their first LP, New York-based duo Sub*T offer an introspective journey through the process of understanding oneself. Living in a social media age in which personal branding has reached heightened importance—and with that, an age of heightened surveillance—it can feel especially daunting to use your own voice, let alone hear it in the first place. Enter How My Own Voice Sounds, a sincere reflection on selfhood.
Although my take on social media sounds negative, it has plenty of potential for bringing people together. For example, Jade Alcantara and Grace Bennett first connected in the 2010s via stan Twitter, forming an online friendship that eventually led the pair to learn guitar and form Sub*T. Two EPs preceded this full-length, So Green in 2021 was produced by Alicia Bognanno of Bully, and Spring Skin in 2024 was produced by Aron Kobayashi Ritch of Momma. The sound of Sub*T fits well into the indie legacy of these two bands, drawing upon the stripped down instrumentation and saturated guitar sound of classic alt-rock.
Lyrically, How My Own Voice Sounds opts for subtle metaphor rather than direct commentary, painting a nuanced and emotionally vulnerable picture of time spent learning about oneself. Within these ten tracks, phones turn into phantom limbs, ego becomes imaginal cells, and coin-operated boys interact with girls in boxes, leaving room for interpretation, relatability, and connection. The musical content only enforces this sense of constant self reflection and rumination. A feature across this album is the thoughtful arrangement of Alcantara and Bennett’s voices, as the songs are stippled with sounds of speaking, whispering, laughing, and whistling. Not only background effects, the arrangement of the sung lines contains meaning as well. In “Mirror Image,” for example, Alcantara’s lead vocals are at times joined by Bennett’s breathier harmonies, which crawl up to fully interact with the lead during the climactic bridge. The two vocal lines are not just melody and harmony, but an intentional play on the title.
The cover art of the album, designed by the band members themselves, is a great representation of the songs inside: a woman extends her arms through a paper bag which obscures her face, beginning to break free but maintaining a nebulous identity. Not too serious but poignantly relatable, How My Own Voice Sounds is a successful amalgamation of years of songwriting, addressing the issues in between good and bad, complicated relationships, communication, and in the forefront the overwhelming—but sometimes wonderful—idea of being a person.