At the outset of Madi Diaz’s seventh studio album, Fatal Optimist, the emphasis is heavy on the “fatal.” On opener “Hope Less,” the Nashville singer-songwriter’s voice bristles with furious disappointment over the sullen thrum of her guitar, a metallic echo only serving to emphasize her solitude. “You want me to want less/And I wanted to need less,” she belts, on a rough-hewn and bereft chorus. But what she really wants, as the wordplay of the title has it, is to “hope less.”
It’s a gutting introduction to Diaz’s latest record, which is billed as the third in a “heartache trilogy.” It follows her 2021 breakout record History of a Feeling—the one that, despite being her fifth studio album, led to mainstream success and tours with Waxahatchee and Harry Styles—and the 2024 follow-up, Weird Faith. Both mined the chaotic, tender headspace of breakups and new relationships: the rage, the jealousy, the embarrassment, and, most of all, the weird and glorious faith that allows us to make ourselves vulnerable all over again after getting hurt. Fatal Optimist, as its title suggests, revisits similar territory—but this time the landscape is darker, and Diaz cuts a more solitary figure as she traverses it. Writing in the wake of another breakup, Diaz says she wanted Fatal Optimist to sound “as isolated as I was feeling.” Together with co-producer Gabe Wax (Soccer Mommy, Adrianne Lenker), she crafted a starkly intimate palette: for the majority of the record, she sings alone, accompanied only by her acoustic guitar.
This elemental soundscape pushes Diaz’s finely crafted melodies and brutal lyrical observations to the forefront more bluntly than ever. On the jittery “Feel Something,” she wrings every drop of angry pathos from the chorus’s desperate plea to an ex who’s checked out: “You can call me if you feel something.” Elsewhere, on the softer, country-infused ballad “If Time Does What It’s Supposed To,” she falls almost to a whisper, faced with the immoveable finality of loss. These are breakup songs under a microscope, each ragged breath and fatalistic impulse rendered in high definition.
