Caroline Made the Most Life-Affirming Album of the Year So Far

There’s a quote I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: “Who wants a solo career? There’s a thing happening.” The line is uttered by one of the many, many members of the great Canadian indie-rock collective Broken Social Scene in It’s All Gonna Break, a tenderhearted new documentary about the group’s unlikely rise in the 2000s. And the “thing” in question could be a lot of things. 

It’s the euphoria of collaboration, of humans breathing the same air and pinging brain bursts back and forth in search of art, meaning, and emotion. The thing is faceless, nameless. It’s the opposite of the pop star who solely conquers the world under a harsh spotlight while huffing the fumes of their own genius. Zooming out, the thing is embracing collective action in any and all forms in order to combat psychotic capitalism and authoritarianism. Broken Social Scene have been barrelling ahead with all of those ideas for a quarter-century, most memorably on their 2002 breakthrough, You Forgot It in People. That record is one of my all-time favorites, filled with music that’s mended my psyche, cushioned deep disappointments, and made me believe there is such a thing as a greater good if we could all put our petty bullshit aside for two fucking seconds. It’s really hard to manifest that thing. But the London octet Caroline have done it with their second album: Caroline 2 is the spiritual successor to You Forgot It in People that we need right now. 

Caroline are an ideal as much as a band. They have spoken about their commitment to collective action and “assertive class politics” as they came up amid Brexit and increased privatization in the UK. (Notably, most of this century’s finest music collectives, including the New Pornographers and Los Campesinos!, have hailed from Canada and the UK—not America, where the myth of individualism remains an intractable, stymying force.) While embarking on writing retreats for Caroline 2, the band would sometimes spend more time engaging in high-minded debates about what they stand for than actually putting together new songs. This kind of strategy could hypothetically result in music that’s about as exciting as a term paper about the history of socialism written by ChatGPT. But Caroline 2 isn’t didactic or preachy. Instead, it simply presents what eight people can do when they let go of ego and embrace what it means to be a human creating among other humans. The beauty, tension, noise, and empathy tumbles out.

Here’s the part of the review where I’d usually write in detail about some of the album’s nine songs, but even breaking it down like that feels wrong. I’ve listened to Caroline 2 upward of 20 times so far, and yeah, some melodies and lyrics stick out. But it’s not like I’m skipping around. I can’t even say I have a favorite track. It’s really about everything coming together. It’s about the gang vocals, offering reassurance. The way I can’t tell which member is singing some of the time. The swells of horns and bass clarinet, reaching toward triumph. Shards of distorted guitar scuffing up pristine acoustic strums. The way some of the singing is quiet and close, a shortcut to intimacy; the way some of the singing is loud and yelpy, a call to arms. Drums that rumble downhill, both in and out of control. How songs sound like they’re being constructed (and destructed) in real-time, how you never quite know exactly what’s going to happen next. It sounds like eight people all winding toward a goal, with all of the loose threads scruffily woven into the musical fabric as evidence of the realities of such handiwork. Because aspiring to a collective mindset is nice, but enacting that ethos is much more difficult. Caroline don’t shy away from those difficulties. They turn them into yet another bonding force.

To get a little more specific, most of Caroline 2 sounds like the memory of a 2 a.m. conversation between friends who are also family. People who will listen to you at your lowest and offer solace and imagine futures you would never allow yourself to dream. Every line seems to carry an enormous desire to be understood. “I’m in trouble/What am I like?” “Do you hear what I’m asking?” “I don’t even know if I’m alive, but I don’t wanna be somebody else.” One line shows up several times throughout the album: “Now I know your mind.” It marks a brain-meld, and in the world of Caroline 2, it sounds like the highest form of connection one could possibly achieve.

For all of their magnificence, collectives come at a cost; our society is set up to make them nearly impossible to build and maintain. (At Hearing Things, we know this first-hand.) In the Broken Social Scene documentary, there is footage of band members coming up with an impromptu ditty while on an early international tour. The hook: “We all lose money on European tours.” It’s a funny moment that underlines the stark financial realities of any kind of collective action. Earlier this year, the UK septet Los Campesinos! broke down precisely how they lost nearly £2,000 playing a sold-out show in Ireland. Caroline can surely relate. According to a recent Loud and Quiet profile, all of the members have day jobs and none earn a salary from the band. The cost of being a collective means Caroline have yet to announce any upcoming U.S. tour dates even though they’re signed to an established indie label, Rough Trade, and just put out one of the most acclaimed albums of 2025. “We don’t make any money,” band member Alex McKenzie said in that same profile, “and we’re all knackered all the time, because of all our jobs, but people come to our gigs and they cry and they have these emotional responses—and actually that’s pretty cool.” It is cool. But coolness doesn’t pay the bills, especially in this era. As an expansive group, Caroline turn that struggle into staggering art. It shouldn’t be so hard, though. And we shouldn’t have to wait so long for the next collective classic.