SOMETHING TO SWELTER TO: Soko's "I Thought I Was an Alien"

I vow to remember gently.

Summer, and summer again. The season is evocative and melancholy for me. Maybe it’s the expectations we put on our sun, or the nature of it all—sitting in the bedroom I grew up in, returning to the same old places with the same old people. There’s a comforting melancholy that surrounds summer. When a heatwave passes along the ridge of the coastline, or everything looks just a little overripe—the grass swollen with pigment, the flowers bursting until their leaves fall off. It’s a lonely and nostalgic feeling, where suddenly you feel like you’re sixteen again, relearning the same emotional lessons.

There’s a photo of me at age 12: hair abused by a straightening iron, face buried in the sand, headphones in. I can only assume—but I’m almost positive—it was Lana Del Rey, or some other overly emotional music that just hits the spot when you’re miserable on a beautiful day.

As the first heatwave of the year passes through Connecticut, I wanted to write about an album that, to me, embodies not only the melancholy of summer, but talks about it too. So I present to you the perfect album to swelter to: I Thought I Was an Alien by French indie artist Soko. Released in 2013, the album explores themes of alienation (duh), loneliness, and growing pains—through love, through life.

With standout tracks like “First Love Never Die” and “I Just Want to Make It New With You,” Soko reminisces on that devotional puppy love—the kind that’s a little unhealthy, but so fundamental to growing up. As I swelter in the summer heat, driving past those sacred first date spots or crying into my comforter, I find myself missing those heartaches. How simple they were. How full of meaning they felt. There’s a kind of love in our past that isn’t meant to last—but it stays with you anyway, as a kind of emotional residue, a tenderness that never really goes away. Sometimes I look back at old memories not to relive them, but to sit with the way they shaped me. To look at the lessons I learned from them—not just the heartbreak, but the softness I gave so freely. The way I loved, the way I believed, the way I held people close.

And now that those moments are gone, I wonder: What do I do with all of that tenderness? Where does it go when there's no one left to give it to?

Soko seems to understand this feeling intimately. On “For Marlon,” she sings:

“And I think that no drugs can replace / the warmth and tenderness that we embraced.”

That’s what this album emanates. Not just sadness or longing, but tenderness—tenderness that’s become a ghost. A warmth that once had a body and a name, now turned into something shapeless but still vivid, still alive inside you. I Thought I Was an Alien feels like a collection of those old feelings, preserved like pressed flowers between notebook pages. It doesn't just mourn what’s lost—it remembers how beautiful it was to feel it in the first place.

Soko sings in “First Love Never Die”:

“Long time no see / Long time wondering / What you were doing / Who you were seeing / I wish I could go back to it.”

It’s that certain longing for a reality that no longer exists. With a whispery, sentimental voice—curled around each word by her Parisian accent—Soko presents a sonic landscape that reads almost like a nursery rhyme for the past. Calming and accepting. Lyrics short and sweet. A bedroom indie dream for the kind of summer day that presses heat into your chest and memory into your skin.

The album follows familiar bedroom pop patterns, but her voice is especially unique—it carries the emotion in a way that feels lived-in and deeply personal. There’s a breathiness to it that reminds me of Björk singing your indie sleaze daydream. I Thought I Was an Alien is everything I need to remember my past through rose-colored glasses, wrapped in the soft, warbling comfort of 2013.

And to quote a sentiment I carry around in my list of important sentiments, from Sreesha Divakaran: “No I don’t miss you…Not in a way that one is missed. But I think of you. Sometimes. In the way that one might think of the summer sunshine on a winter night.” These are the kinds of shadows that follow me around in the summer heat. As the liquid from our bodies melts, so do the memories, forming an overly emotional puddle—equally as powerful and overripe as the fruit growing heavy on the vine.

I’ve grown up as a very sensitive soul—someone who has often felt alienated for my deeply introspective nature. As I grow, or at least in my better moments, I see this sensitivity as a power. But in the ways it’s held me back—kept me from speaking my mind, made me overcommit to the dreams of someone else, isolated me in my own head—I’ve resented it. I’ve distanced myself from it. I’ve often felt like an alien. And to this day, I feel like I’m always searching for that place to fit in, always an inch away. Maybe it’s a common experience. But in her lyrics, Soko gives words and sound to the loneliness that’s followed me since childhood. That makes this album a special one for me.

As my first love once told me, “There’s a difference between loneliness and being lonely.” This album doesn’t try to solve that riddle. It doesn’t search for the reasons we feel like aliens, or offer solutions. Instead, it offers something better: a friend. A comforting album to sit next to, to talk to and from. In its simplicity, it breeds authenticity and relatability—and in that, we can all sit as aliens together.

Aliens in the heat. Aliens in our oddness. Aliens in a summer that always seems to know exactly where to find us.

Pique your interest? Listen to it here: