Smother by Daughter

I have never done this before, but there have been some songs that have compelled me to talk about them. One of these songs is Daughter’s “Smother,” from their 2013 album If You Leave. A haunting meditation on love, dependency, and the suffocating weight of emotional intensity that can both sustain and destroy us.

Daughter emerged from the London indie scene in the early 2010s. I’m pretty sure you must have heard their popular song Medicine. At the heart of the trio lies Elena Tonra’s vocals, alongside guitarist Igor Haefeli and drummer Remi Aguilella. Their music exists in the space between folk and electronic, between whisper and scream, specializing in the kind of devastating beauty that makes heartbreak feel like art.

Smother can mean to love intensely, overwhelmingly but can also mean to suffocate, to extinguish or kill. I believe Smother is about the paradox of overwhelming love. We’ve all been there. When affection becomes so consuming that it transforms from a source of warmth into something that feels like drowning. I don’t remember feeling the emotional claustrophobia through a song before.

The song came about during a time when conversations about emotional labor and the expectations placed on women in relationships were beginning to enter mainstream discourse. While I am not sure if I am over-interpreting, there is something about the song that feels like it’s examining the way women are often expected to endlessly nurturing, even when that nurturing becomes self-destructive. The song does not provide any answers or moral judgments. It allows us to sit with that discomfort of recognizing harmful patterns and lets us acknowledge the genuine love that underlies them.

Sometimes the most profound art does not explain or resolve the contradictions it explores, like so much of human experience. Sometimes it’s perfectly alright to listen to a song that helps us feel less alone with our questions.