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Jun 15, 2023 By Caleb Campbell Photography by BMILLZ

Later this month, Brooklyn-based indie rock outfit Big Girl are set to debut their first full-length record, Big Girl Vs. God. Produced by Justin Pizzoferrato (Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., Speedy Ortiz), the record was written while lead singer Kaitlin Pelkey was coping with the loss of her mother and finds the band exploring themes of grief, trauma, and loss. Yet, despite this reflective undercurrent, the band conjures a raw and anthemic style, leaning into theatrical melodies and athletic guitar work with their early singles, “Summer Sickness,” “Black-Eyed Susan,” and “Instructions 2 Say Sorry.”

Today, ahead of the record’s release the band are back with a new ballad, “Forever,” along with an accompanying video, premiering with Under the Radar.

“Forever” acts as a cathartic centerpiece for the record, pouring layers of towering grief and heartache into a slow-burning confessional. Here Pelkey directly addresses the loss of her mother, surveying the conflicting swirl of emotions that accompany a devastating loss and grappling with the finality of ‘forever’: “I could have tried harder / I could have been a better daughter / Instead of a martyr / We had the time of our lives / Don’t think twice.” The track traces Pelkey’s loss with keening pedal steel and distant hazy piano chords, but its cornerstone is Pelkey’s heart-wrenching vocal performance, especially in the searing climactic crescendo. The track feels like part tribute and part fiery exorcism, as Pelkey tears the raw wounds of her grief open.

Meanwhile, the accompanying video, directed by actor and writer Brandon Flynn (The Parenting, Hellraiser, Thirteen Reasons Why), is equally haunting and elegiac. The video features Pelkey’s parent’s 1991 wedding video playing on an old ‘80s TV set, interspersed with aching close-ups of Pelkey in an increasingly surreal swirl of images.

Pelkey says of the track, “In January 2020, my life changed forever when I got the news – my mother was in emergency surgery to save her life after suffering an intracerebral brain hemorrhage. After a long and arduous period of recovery in hospitals and at home, my mom Catherine Pelkey passed away in August 2021.

I wrote all the lyrics and melody to ‘Forever’ walking to work every day, while my mom was fighting for her life in the ICU. I was walking around Gowanus with a broken heart whispering lyrics to myself: ‘Forever… no I don’t know about forever’. Writing and erasing, editing all the lyrics in my head.

Forever is about grief and loss but it is also largely about the idea of permanence. Which is impossible for me to wrap my mind around. Everything is constantly in flux, ‘they say that nothing lasts forever,’ most things can be undone, mistakes can be fixed and erased. But not this. The prospect of losing my mother permanently completely warped my sense of reality. Although I had long ago learned death as a fact of life, being so close to it, seeing the ‘forever-ness’ of it broke open new dimensions of reality that I attempted to express in writing this song.

In Forever I wrote things I was afraid to say out loud. ‘I could have tried harder / I could have been a better daughter.’ The kind of things your therapist would discourage you from believing but nonetheless you reckon with when the prospect of losing somebody permanently becomes real. The song ends with a real promise, one that I have tried my hardest to uphold: ‘I will be better for you’ – and I am.”

Check out the song and video below, out everywhere now. Big Girl Vs. God is out June 30th via Weird Sister Records.