Ally Bakst turns up the gain on 'Pain & Pleasure'

Born in New York, but currently calling the palm-sprinkled streets of Los Angeles home, singer-songwriter Ally Bakst has spent the first half of the 2020s putting her own mark on independent pop music. With three EPs already under her belt, Bakst, who also has a large hand in producing her own works, has arrived at juncture that sees her taking a sonic turn of sorts – into a grittier and darker, but bigger space. From a mixtape slated to release later this year, there’s no better sampling of that than her latest, “Pain & Pleasure.” Guitars drive the short but captivating number, which Bakst says grapples with the “strange comfort in suffering.” At the track’s closure, what began fixed and subdued swells into an untethered distortion, not just resembling the spectrum from pain to pleasure, but perhaps a sign of where Bakst is headed next too.

Words by Andy Gorel
Photos by Evers Pund

“There’s a strange comfort in suffering. We can become so attached to our own pain that it starts to feel like home, a place where you’re trapped between everything good feeling bad and everything bad feeling good. I wanted the song to feel that push and pull in real time, almost as if the music itself couldn’t decide whether it wanted to consume you or pull back.”