LOS ANGELES, CA- With just days to go before the release of their second full-length album Growing Pains (out April 11), Los Angeles harmonic trio Trousdale have pulled back the curtain on one last track, and it’s a stunner. “Secondhand Smoke,” a raw and emotionally charged downtempo ballad, might just be the trio’s most vulnerable offering to date—a slow-burning confessional that lands with the weight of a whispered truth too long held in.
From the first lightly strummed guitar, the atmosphere is set: sparse, delicate, yet emotionally freighted. It’s in this sonic style that Trousdale—Quinn D’Andrea, Georgia Greene, and Lauren Jones—do what they do best. Their harmonies, which have always served as the band’s not-so-secret weapon, don’t just support the track—they elevate it, turning pain into poetry. But it’s that solitary, breath-held moment—the line “I can save myself, but I can’t save you”—delivered in a lone voice before the harmonies return, that leaves you gutted. It’s not just a lyric. It’s an emotional gut-punch dressed as a sigh, a devastating exhale of surrender.
The song explores the emotional terrain of toxic love, an intimate portrait of codependency, drawn in the softest strokes. “It’s about loving someone who is battling their own destructive traits—traits that are slowly harming not just them, but also you,” explains D’Andrea in the track’s press release. The metaphor of “secondhand smoke” is achingly apt—beautiful in its simplicity, brutal in its resonance. This is songwriting at its most affecting: personal enough to feel real, universal enough to cut deep.
There’s something inherently honest in the way Trousdale deliver their music. It was that same honesty that drew me in the first time I heard “Happy Anymore.” The lush folk elements, the crystalline harmonies—they don’t just sing to you; they sing through you. And with “Secondhand Smoke,” they’ve crafted a song that doesn’t just ask to be heard—it demands to be felt. I found myself listening on repeat, again and again, just to get back to that one line. That one moment of emotional release. It’s the kind of lyric you don’t forget. The kind you carry with you, like a scar or a secret.
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