Tearing down the walls of nostalgia with GRAE’s “Boxes”

Nostalgia can be a hard thing to quit, and maybe even harder as an artist. When your work is filled with digging in the crates, cycling and sourcing through influences and inspirations, objects like records, band T-shirts, and show posters become the objects that define you. This is exactly the problem Toronto-based musician GRAE is facing on her new track “Boxes.”

“The idea for “Boxes”,” says GRAE, “came about when I looked around my room one day and realised I wanted to tear down all the posters I’ve had on my walls since I can remember.” Filled with a mix of emotions—anywhere from sentimental and romantic to frustrated—GRAE wanted to write a song that captured this confusion.

“Boxes” does exactly that through a mix of loud and quiet, soft and hard, featuring anything from a clean bass and drum line to a loud but distant grunge guitar. But this dissonance is somehow levelled out by GRAE’S whispery, light voice, which perfectly captures the desire to move on, the need for self-reflection and understanding, and, perhaps, the need to get a little restless and tear some posters down. In her own words, “I felt super nostalgic as I went through my band T’s and started clearing out my space. I decided to write about the process of coming to terms with what it means to be an ‘adult’ and the result of that is “Boxes”.”

The track shows the process to be anything but easy, the first lyric of the song being “I’m feeling nauseous.” As GRAE catalogues much of her belongings, the instrumental builds to a climax during the chorus, where the singer’s own voice interrupts with comments like “Nostalgia knows me well” or, “But I’m not that kid anymore”, and the removal process almost plays out like an internal fight. To quit or not quit nostalgia; GRAE decides to quit.

But, if the track makes quitting sound like a challenge, the music video makes quitting look triumphant. Directed by Gemma Warren, the video features GRAE and her friends posing in a photo booth, partying, singing along, a playing air guitar. In a way, it perfectly summarises that feeling, not only the difficulty in moving on—which the song does itself—but the pride one should take in moving on, and the ways that should be celebrated.

On the video GRAE comments, “The song is about growing up and coming to terms with leaving a part of you behind, and the photo booth set captured that sentimentality I had felt when I wrote the song when I was thinking back on my teenage years.”

For GRAE, “Boxes” is a way of looking back so as to look forward. In the meantime, she is without a doubt looking forward to the release of her debut LP Whiplash.