What hath Lizzy McAlpine wrought? Billianne’s debut album is rank and file diary-posting, emblematic of the forecasted epoch of Tiktok lyricism. 

Canadian singer-songwriter Billianne came up via the apparent last remaining path in music: going viral on TikTok. Her cover of Tina Turner’s “The Best” made the rounds, landing her a spot on the Kelly Clarkson show and social media comments from John Mayer, Noah Kahan and Taylor Swift. 

Cue the ten-second demo snippets racking up likes, cue the record deal, cue Billianne’s first-ever flights and train rides to Toronto; hence her debut album’s title. 

In interviews and her work alike, Billianne is transparently green, wide-eyed and earnest. Nothing wrong with that. What’s wrong with this record is its acquiescence to the conventions of an adjacent unfortunate sensibility that’s crawled over the singer-songwriter realm in recent years: TikTok singer-songwriter music. Its unwitting (and far superior) foremothers are Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus; its big sister Lizzy McAlpine. Current practitioners are Jensen McRae, Holly Humberstone, Gracie Abrams and now, Billianne. 

Think Jensen McRae blowing up to epic and comical proportions the memory of an ex boyfriend’s favorite beer and video games in “Massachusetts” (which she performed with a jolting earnesty on the Culture Awards, stopping the otherwise farcical evening cold). Try to make sense of Gracie Abrams’ word salad in “That’s So True.” And now, hear Billianne open her debut record with a clodding piano ballad played sickeningly straight. 

That’s the problem with this cohort and its newest inductee: they’ve got earnestness, and not much else. Taking Modes of Transportation as an ideal case study: production is unremarkable. Folk-inflected pop backs her vocals, which are, to be clear, lovely — sometimes purring, sometimes ringing like a bell, sometimes sounding a helluva lot like Dacus herself. But the unimposing production should serve to spotlight play and vision in lyricism; here, both are so plain as to make the eyes glaze over. 

Billianne’s lyrics are far from the worst offender (no, seriously, someone reveal what “That’s So True” is supposed to communicate —   quickly) but they do share characteristics with the dawning epoch of TikTok lyricism. They’re mostly about a love interest, but not in a way that sheds light on a sense of self or the way people relate to each other; in a one dimensional high-school-crush sense that takes a romantic interest as an inherently worthy subject of endless study, no matter how banal the object, the story, the circumstances. See: “we could be more than a crush, so make me blush.”

Billianne at least weaves in the thread of growing up and getting out — but never follows up. The record is all ideation about leaving, living, learning; and none of the real thing. See “Future Emma,” which only imagines packing up and taking the next train out of town. It’s strange, considering this year Billianne did jet-set across Canada and the US during her breakout moment, meaningfully leaving her hometown for the first time. But the record doesn’t reflect the learnings and expansion of someone who’s left, only the vague and generic daydreams, guesses at what the world looks like, of someone whose full life has been lived scribbling in a journal in her bedroom. 

Now, sheltered life, small-town life and high school love have spawned fantastic music. See: Ethel Cain, Kacey Musgraves, even Youth Lagoon, who spins nostalgic provinciality into the weird, profound and sublime. The hard-to-describe difference between these artists and TikTok musicians is that TikTok musicians seem to take their extremely banal experiences as the start and end point of artistic inquiry. To them, a song is just a vessel to communicate the easy-to-communicate sentiment of liking a boy, or being hurt by a boy. No need to dress anything up. As a point of comparison, Olivia Rodrigo is building a career on her girlish misadventures, but approaches adolescent heartache with a degree of curiosity about what it reveals; the expectations placed on women as romantic objects in “All American Bitch” or the grief of a future lost in “Driver’s License.” Not to mention, those songs sound interesting (props on props to Dan Nigro) down to the blinker-as-instrument in the latter. Modes of Transportation, meanwhile, which uses the exact same conceit, thuds in with piano that signals a girl is about to have a lot of feelings about a crush and expects you to as well without trying anything in particular to impart the vivid, wrenching experience of that crush that you could actually relate to. Even this analysis struggles to actually be about Modes of Transportation, because it feels like there’s not much there to analyze. 

That’s ultimately it: some will love Modes of Transportation, but not on its own merits. TikTok songwriting relies on formulaic shorthand, the use of which is in itself satisfying to fans, absent any musical or lyrical experimentation. Fans will love Modes because it hits the same marks as Holly, Lizzy, Jensen and Gracie: the piano will thud in, signaling it’s time to shed a little tear, an innocent, yearning voice will sing about how she’s just a girl, a boy will be wanted or lost and hey, you’ve wanted or lost a boy! She’s so you! That’s so true! 

Every artist need not cloak their meaning in layers of code like Samia, or personae like Japanese Breakfast, but these lyrics are first-thought. They simply state a feeling rather than attempting to evoke it. Language will never perfectly convey experience, but the beauty of language-based art forms is circling that experience, lunging towards it, describing the closest thing to it you can. There’s artistry in the attempting — to evoke, to describe, to break apart, to interrogate. The trouble with TikTok lyrics and the sound that inoffensively backs them is that they decline that attempt in favor of simply naming a feeling and assuming with a shrug that you’ll get the picture. And in this neck of the woods, the Highly Sensitive Person brigade will get the picture, and they’ll eat it up. 

Maybe Billianne can do better. She’s young, and there are moments of promise on this record: her lovely timbre on “Baby Blue,” the boygenius-esque grinding guitars and thudding drums on “Future Emma.”

Perhaps The Boys of boygenius keep coming up here because they could be an escape route for Billianne from this abject genre: they’re writing sometimes-quiet, sometimes-hooky, always-intimate fare like Billianne — but they’re always doing something. In the words of the Mother Gaia of diary-cracking girl-and-guitar music, all they do is “try, try, try.” The TikTok talent discovery machine from whence Billianne came doesn’t ask lyricists to try.