ulture looks into the ideas of gender, being questioned last year in albums by Shamir ('Heterosexuality'), Hikaru Utada ('Bad Mode'), and Leikeli47 ('Shape Up'). "Each of these albums point to a path away from 'representation' being a totalizing force in discussions of how gender is broken down in music. Instead of existing solely as an identity for the artist in question to inhabit, the destruction of binary gender ideas can be a prerogative. Identity can only go so far. These artists show us how non-binary ideas of gender can be used as verbs, something to do, not just something to be".

Today, Aldous Harding released her new album 'Warm Chris', a strange collection of minimalist baroque folk songs. Recently, she talked to Pitchfork about it (The P tagged it best new music, gave it 8,2), and her personality: "For me, taking identity too seriously is really detrimental to my music. People say to me, 'Why don’t you use your real voice?'. But what people don’t understand is that I don’t know what my normal voice is anymore. In a lot of ways, I feel like the songs are like secrets that the muse is keeping from me. I have to listen, and then it tells me where the gaps in the universe are, and then I try to fill them with good intentions".

NPR delves into "sapphic" or "wlw" (woman-loving woman) music genre, which encompasses lesbians, bisexual women, and other women and femme people who experience attraction to other women. Among lesbian and bisexual musicians, the descriptors of "sapphic" and "wlw" are most commonly associated with the music of rising Gen Z stars like Clairo, girl in red, and King Princess. In September the pop group MUNA, in collaboration with so-called sapphic icon Phoebe Bridgers, released what was arguably the first song specifically engineered to be received as a sapphic anthem: 'Silk Chiffon'.

“It was like, ‘I can be comfortable and out and gay, or I can do country music, but I definitely can’t do both’” - one gay country artist told Rolling Stone about the dichotomy that now appears to be falling apart. There are several that have come out recently - Brooke Eden, T.J. Osborne, Lily Rose, Shelly Fairchild - without jeopardizing their careers.