Sasha Alex Sloan almost didn’t make this album. After nearly a decade of bouncing between the writers’ room and the spotlight, the Boston-raised, Nashville-based singer-songwriter sat down with her new management and told them she was done being an artist. She went back to writing for other people, and the timing could not have been better. She co-wrote Olivia Rodrigo‘s “What’s Wrong With Me,” the duet with The Cure’s Robert Smith, along with Karol G and Bruno Mars‘ “Still.” Then she wrote a song called “Glitter,” felt the pull again, and quietly started building a fourth album.
That album is And The Crowd Goes Mild, and it sounds like the work of someone who no longer needs anything from the industry. Released independently through 10K Projects and produced by her husband and longtime collaborator King Henry alongside Chad Copelin, it runs 10 songs in just over 30 minutes and doesn’t waste a second of them.
The title is the thesis. Sloan has always been at her best when she’s mining melancholy for laughs, and here the joke is about her own career: no stadium roar, just polite applause, and she’s fine with that. “I’m a control freak, and as a songwriter, you have no control,” she has said about her decision to release her own music again. This album is what that control sounds like.
“Glitter” opens the record with the kind of ache she’s built her name on, and it’s easy to hear why it pulled her back. “Empty” goes straight to the core of the album’s emotional territory. “It’s just about being codependent,” Sloan explained, but the song plays like a slow realization rather than a diagnosis. “Still Be Me” watches a couple she knows struggle to hold on, with Sloan putting herself in their shoes and coming out shaken.
Marriage runs through much of the record, and “What It Isn’t” is the clearest example. Sloan has called it one of her favorites, a song about not knowing exactly what you’re building but knowing what you refuse to become. It’s quietly one of the most romantic things she’s written. “Fun” switches gears with a rhythmic, ’80s-tinged pop pulse that feels new for her, and it lands.
Then there’s “Delusional Optimism,” the album’s sharpest piece of writing. Sloan stacks up wishes she knows are impossible (her dogs living forever among them) and turns them into a coping mechanism. “I think my only option is delusional optimism,” she said about the moment the idea clicked. It’s a depression anthem with a grin, and nobody does that better.
The album’s restraint is its strength and, occasionally, its ceiling. With a narrow emotional palette and such a short runtime, a few moments feel more like sketches than finished statements, and listeners hoping for the bigger swings of I Blame The World won’t find them here. But that’s a choice, not a miss.
And The Crowd Goes Mild is an artist making music purely because the songs demanded it. The crowd may go mild. The songs don’t.
