Growing up is a mindfuck. As a kid, I took no small amount of comfort in the thought that I wouldn’t be like this forever—that getting better would naturally come hand-in-hand with getting older. That so long as I held out long enough to see it, the future me would inherently be someone better than the me of the present-turned-past. I’ve thus spent much of my young adulthood choking down the same bitter pill: you age without doing anything at all, but that doesn’t mean you automatically mature alongside it. Growth takes work, even if growing older doesn’t, and just because you’re alive doesn’t mean you’re living, let alone living well. Turns out it’s all too easy to wake up one morning at 24 and realize you’re the same person you were at 15, still marching numbly through life, subconsciously waiting for the day you wake up to find you’ve finally become someone better instead.
That’s more or less the animating crisis of No Need to Be Lonely, Koch’s third album as Gladie (but the first produced by DIY legend Jeff Rosenstock): the slow-dawning horror that the future you were banking on isn’t coming to save you, and the years you spent waiting for it have already passed. “Too late to grow into the life you had in mind when you were young / Too soon to see you where you are,” Koch sings on “Poison,” and the line lands like a door clicking shut. But the record isn’t a wallow, it’s a plea: after all, the aforementioned verse begins with “Can you just be here now?” If the realization that you’ve been sleepwalking is the bad news, then the album’s project is the exhausting, unglamorous, not-remotely-guaranteed work of waking yourself up—learning to be present in a life you’ve been passively enduring, trying to build something when the blueprint you’d been promised turns out to be blank. “Nostalgia’s just fool’s gold,” Koch repeats on the closing track “Unfolding,” like she’s trying to tattoo it onto the inside of her own eyelids. If we can’t get back the years we’ve lost and we can’t spend our life waiting for a future that won’t arrive on its own, all we can do is live in the “eternal now”: “Paths are made by walking,” she sings, “I can take the first step.” You can—but will you?
Koch has been doing this—turning blunt self-awareness into something that hits like a jolt of bad adrenaline, or maybe a truck—since Cayetana, and if you know her work, you know her voice: raw, slightly raspy, cracking open at the moments that count, the kind of instrument that makes you lean in because it sounds like it might not survive the next line. When Cayetana broke up in 2019 (long may they rest in peace), Koch started Gladie with her partner Matt Schimelfenig. The first two records, while genuinely very good, lived in a somewhat quieter register, more singer-songwriter than punk, as if she’d made a conscious decision to leave some of the volume behind with the old band name.
No Need to Be Lonely is where those two impulses finally crash into each other. Rosenstock, who signed on to produce after hearing Koch’s demos and apparently couldn’t help himself, doesn’t impose his signature frenzied maximalism so much as sharpen Koch’s noisier instincts. The album was tracked live to tape by Jack Shirley at Atomic Garden in Oakland, and you can hear the room in every song, the whole band breathing together in real time. The result is the most full-throttle thing Koch has done since Cayetana, but with all the emotional patience Gladie taught her in the interim—songs that erupt from nowhere and pull back to a whisper, a piano ballad that splits open into double-time rock like a cocoon tearing from the inside, an Americana detour with brushed snare and twangy guitar that never once feels like a gimmick.
Koch never lets the thesis drift too far from the body. No Need to Be Lonely is a record about the daily grind of trying to become a better person, and it sounds like the daily grind of trying to become a better person—scrappy, imperfect, running on caffeine and stubbornness and the desperate hope that showing up counts for something. “Brace Yourself” captures this as well as anything here: a song about watching someone you love face illness while the world has the audacity to keep looking beautiful, it opens with “How dare the morning look so peaceful / When it knows your fragile fate?” and the band—Schimelfenig’s flanged guitars, Miles Demianczyk’s thundering drums, Evan Ziskind’s bass all surging together—roars behind Koch as she delivers the chorus (“I won’t hold back a compliment / I’ll be careful with how my time is spent”) with this wrenching blend of sweetness and fury, rage and tenderness occupying the same breath.
“Car Alarm,” meanwhile, is maybe the most purely catchy thing Koch has written in years, its bright guitars grinning through their teeth while Koch takes inventory of her own complicity. Then there’s “I Want That for You,” the title track in spirit if not in name (“Got so good at being alone / Now there’s no need to be lonely”), which contains an entire arc of self-worth in miniature: Koch opens the song with descriptions of making herself scarce, then urges the subject to “transform yourself” until “you fill every page,” before building into a mantra of “I want that for you, I want that for me too!” over a wall of immense, distorted guitar, the loneliness of the album title finally inverting into something communal (“If you stick around, I’ll stick around / Now there’s no need to be lonely”). The way all the instrumentation cuts out on the last “no need to be lonely,” leaving Koch’s voice hanging alone in sudden silence, is a small production touch that earns an outsized emotional payoff. “Future Spring” leans into the notion of community even harder, with a chorus of friends backing Koch up as she sings “Hey, you’re invited, and we’re glad you’re here.”
The record’s range reveals itself in subtler shifts, too. “Fix Her” opens as a spare keyboard ballad—no drums, no guitar, just Koch threading her voice through empty air as she traces a relationship she couldn’t save. “I wanted so badly for you to see / The lengths I’d go to get healthy,” she sings. The song is devastating in its restraint, every breath and scrape audible. And then: pregnant pause, full instrumentation, heavy distorted guitars, rapid drums, the whole shebang—Koch belts “I can’t fix her but I can fix me if I try” like she’s trying to will it into truth through sheer volume. It’s a striking structural gambit, though whether the cathartic blowout earns its keep or undercuts the vulnerability that preceded it is a question the song doesn’t quite resolve. “I Will If You Will” swaps the album’s distortion entirely for acoustic guitar, brushed snare, and organ, Koch’s voice ringing wide in a reverb-drenched room where every crack in her delivery becomes load-bearing. And “Blurry,” at a 1:23 runtime, might be the most sonically distinct thing here: just Koch, an acoustic guitar, and a vocal that sounds like it’s being broadcast through a tin can, singing about marigolds blurring past on the way to the Carbon County Fair. It lingers longer than songs twice its length.
If there’s a limitation, it’s that the album’s emotional range occasionally outpaces its sonic one. Koch and company favor a reliable playbook—build, pause, erupt into the final chorus—and the heavily distorted rockers that make up the album’s core, while thrilling individually, can start to bleed into one another over the back half; by “Lucky for Another,” the architecture starts to feel perhaps more familiar than it should. But there’s something very honest in that. No Need to Be Lonely doesn’t resolve that tension so much as learn to live inside it. Growth doesn’t feel like a montage; it feels like doing the same thing over and over and over, slightly differently each time, until one morning you realize the repetition has quietly become change. Koch seems to know this. “I’m crawling, I’m building—it’s collapsing again,” she sings on “Car Alarm.” The dash between building and collapsing is where the whole album lives: not in the triumph, not in the defeat, but in the and then you try again. [Get Better Records]
Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at Paste and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].
