Album Review: Self Proclaimed Narcissist by Self Proclaimed Narcissist
Broke, anonymous, and blunt about both. A debut built on busted guitars and overdrawn accounts that says more about Los Angeles poverty than most records twice its budget.
Somewhere in Laurel Canyon, somebody was skipping meals and writing songs about it. No label money behind the sessions. No studio budget worth mentioning. Just a guitar, a microphone, and a bank account so far in the red that cigarettes became a luxury. The album that came out of those months, Self Proclaimed Narcissist, by an artist who goes by the same name and nothing else, arrived with almost no public identity attached. A blurry clip on TikTok. A Notion magazine profile built almost entirely on guesswork. No confirmed real name, no face in press photos, no interviews that pin down much beyond the music itself. The anonymity attracted early attention, but the record doesn’t lean on mystery. It leans on specifics—rent almost late, Hollywood sidewalks stained with cigarette ash, a girl who pulls him aside and says leaving is the only fair option because he can’t afford to stay.
On “Do Dreams Still Happen?” he confesses he wished the wildfires had taken his life so he could escape the actors and the traffic. The line arrives early, without warning, and sticks in your teeth for the rest of the LP. The verse before it is about scrambling for part-time work because rent was due. The verse after is about picking up bad habits again on Hollywood pavement. Ambition on this album keeps collapsing under the weight of empty pockets. “Space (I’m So Broke)” goes further, and it’s the most precisely drawn song here. He couldn’t afford a cigarette. His mind was racing at 102 miles per hour. He confides to her that it was never about her. It was about being too broke to stand next to. She watches him eat the same meal for weeks and stays in love anyway, until she pulls him aside and states the arrangement is unfair to her body. The hook says he wishes he’d stayed, but she probably wishes he were dead, so he’ll keep his distance. Money is the engine of loss on this album. Relationships don’t end because of incompatibility or betrayal. They end because the guy can’t buy dinner.
Seven months into a breakup, the voice on “New Man” is still sending messages that go ignored. He admits he broke her heart, saw the tears, ruined it. She has a new boyfriend. He asks if the new man can do what he couldn’t. The track doesn’t pretend he deserves a second chance. He just says he wants one, then concedes he’s looking for her at the bottom of a cup. That dynamic, wanting what you wrecked, knowing you wrecked it, circling back anyway, repeats across nearly every love cut on the LP. “My Boo” recounts how he had to isolate, couldn’t let her see him a certain way, and couldn’t make it past July. “You & I” opens with “it feels like something died” and then spends two verses performing indifference about a breakup he clearly hasn’t survived. He insists the substance makes him feel less, he still gets his reps in, he’s laughing at her new man—but then offers himself back whenever she calls. The album title names this loop directly. He proclaimed his own narcissism, saw the pattern, and kept going. “Raven’s Song,” the closer, puts it flat: “It’s not surprising I went running back to my old patterns.” The self-awareness never converts to change. Whether that’s honest or just stuck depends on what you want from a songwriter, but the debut earns the admission by never faking growth it hasn’t done.
Three cuts pull the camera off the singer’s chest and point it at other women. “Save Her” follows a woman whose father left on a Sunday, who lost her faith, who works until sunrise. The refrain calls her “somebody’s baby girl, scarred by the whole damn world,” and the post-chorus tells her not to listen to what people say, that they’ll cloud her power and miss her when she fades. He doesn’t save her. The title is directed at someone else, or maybe no one. “Cherry” tracks a woman who went quiet after having a child. No one helps. He sees loneliness on her face and assures her she’s far from ordinary, then shifts to advice in the post-chorus: don’t wait for another person to give you what you’re missing, learn to make your own decisions. “Promiscuous” circles a woman who claims sixteen days sober, and he doesn’t believe her. He urges her to slow down. The section snaps: “Will you ever care about anyone but yourself?” These three numbers give the LP its widest aperture. They prove the singer can see beyond his own mess, even if he can’t fix anybody else’s.
The darkest lines on this debut never announce themselves. On “Lost in California,” between lines about rolling a spliff to numb the displacement and a person who wants love he can’t give, the chorus asks a plain question: “If I pass away, will it matter?” Earlier, on the opener, he wished wildfires had ended his life. Later, on “Space,” he guesses she probably wishes he were dead. These aren’t performed as dramatic confessions. They drop into otherwise gentle, guitar-carried songs the way dark thoughts drop into an afternoon, between cigarettes, between errands, without ceremony. The record never stops to address them head-on, and that’s part of why they register. A louder record would treat these lines as centerpieces. Here they’re asides, and they weigh more for it.
Only one number on the record reaches for an idea bigger than its immediate situation. The verses of “Slow Burn” cover familiar ground: wanting to give her everything, knowing he can’t, weed in his lungs, staying up all night. But the bridge voices something the rest of the LP avoids: “Everything you want isn’t all you need, it’s the distance/All you ever wanted is better as mystery.” That’s the closest this record gets to a governing idea, and it lands because twelve tracks of flat, specific, undecorated confession have earned one moment of stepping back. Raven’s Song” still imagines running into an ex in LA, still in love, still stuck in old patterns, and crooning that he loves her more and more. Nothing wraps up. Nobody moves on. The songs are still playing inside the same cramped apartment where they were written, and the door never opens all the way.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Do Dreams Still Happen?,” “Space (I’m So Broke),” “Raven’s Song”