Paola Bennet’s “Landmines” Blows Up the Quiet Grief of Losing a Friend

Paola Bennet’s “Landmines” is heartbreak mapped in sound—each chord, each lyric a careful step across the wreckage of a friendship that didn’t survive. What begins in the delicate hush of stripped-down folk slowly unfurls into a cinematic tempest: a string quartet swells, electric guitars scream into a stadium-sized solo, and Bennet’s voice rises from wounded to raw.

Born in Boston and now rooted in New York, Bennet has always written like someone tearing pages straight from her ribcage. Her gut-punch lyrics have explored everything from chronic pain to queer longing, and on “Landmines,” she turns her lens on the specific, often overlooked grief of losing a friend you thought would be there forever.

It’s messy—the leftover anger, the everyday objects that become tripwires for memory, the hollow space where comfort used to be. Bennet doesn’t flinch from any of it. Instead, she captures the paradox of heartache: intimate and massive, like crying quietly in your room while the world seems to explode inside your chest.

With “Landmines,” Bennet proves once again why she’s such a compelling voice in the space where folk vulnerability crashes into rock’s grandeur. It’s agony turned into art, and it lingers long after the last note fades.