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Evan Greerâs latest album is a cry against the past yearâs numbness. Recorded at the artistâs home in Boston not long after lockdowns began funneling more and more of life into flattening digital channels,
Spotify Is Surveillance looks simultaneously to the past and future for motivation and reassuranceâanywhere but the deadening now. Greerâs folk-punk songs oscillate between the nostalgic and the propulsive, between grasping at the charge of teenage emotions and envisioning a livable future outside the grip of platform capitalism.
Greer is a digital rights activist as well as a musician, and the title of her new record refers, in part, to a patent Spotify recently secured for technology that would allow it to make music recommendations based on algorithmic voice recognition that could detect attributes like gender, age, and mood. But the title is also a condemnation of how tech companies accumulate data on their users even when they