There’s a particular kind of melancholy that only an airport can deliver: fluorescent eternity, overcaffeinated passengers, the half-life of dreams announced through failing PA systems. Jennifer Touch takes that limbo and turns it into her studio. Aging at Airports sounds like someone composing hymns to impermanence on a moving walkway that never quite reaches its destination.

Touch has always balanced shadow and shimmer, but here she digs into something more existential. Not the grand, cinematic kind of existentialism - no Sartre at gate C23 - but the quieter dread of recognizing your reflection in a polished departure-hall window and thinking: Is that really me? Or just the version of me that’s always running to catch up? For an artist who has spent years touring across continents, the theme is brutally honest. Airports promise velocity, but deliver waiting. They promise youth and glamour, but leave you counting the fluorescent wrinkles. Touch doesn’t hide from this tension; she wraps her synths around it like a thermal blanket that’s half comfort, half survival mechanism.

Musically, the album flickers between modes like a glitchy departure board. “Behaviour” and “Ceiling” nod toward EBM but with a softness that refuses macho posturing - EBM with a heart murmur rather than a chest puff. “Walls of Patience” drifts into drone-pop territory, the kind that feels like walking through fog at 4 a.m. with your carry-on as your only confidant. “Dripping” and “Wars & Blood Red Roses” embrace minimal pulses, stripped down to the bone, like she’s chiseling rhythm out of the airport’s architecture itself.mAnd then there’s “Rumble (Defiance)” - a short, sharp shock aimed squarely at the dancefloor’s dark corners. It’s as if Touch, after spending the whole album reflecting on decay, suddenly remembers that she can still bend a club to her will whenever she feels like it.

Lyrically, she navigates vulnerability without veering into melodrama. Her voice carries both the weight of lived experience and the slyness of someone who knows that taking yourself too seriously is simply another trap. The contrast between her soulful delivery and the sleek electronic surfaces is the album’s emotional engine: raw humanity pressing against polished machinery.

For those familiar with her earlier work - or her collaborations with Curses, Paranoid London, and the rest of the neo-darkwave constellation - this record feels like both a continuation and a shedding of skin. Touch leans into clarity rather than mystique, into the discomfort of honesty rather than the safety of posture.

Aging at Airports is not a lament; it’s a portrait of becoming. It’s the sound of an artist accepting that time moves, even when the flight doesn’t. And somewhere between the boarding zones and the synthetic glow of the terminal, she manages to find a pulse that is unmistakably her own.

A record about fading that somehow leaves you feeling more alive.