Listen to Brittany Broski’s feeling: sad <3 playlist
Most know her as “Kombucha Girl”, but the TikTok creator and basement comedy queen has moved beyond being a meme and is sharing a more unvarnished, emotional side in her playlist.
Music
Words: Trey Taylor
Most know Brittany Broski as “Kombucha Girl”, crowned thus when a video of her taste-testing the fizzy drink and reacting with a whole Shakespearean play’s worth of facial expressions in 21 seconds went viral last summer. Broski speedily moved beyond becoming an accidental meme with her infectious bazooka-laugh and Love Island parodies on her TikTok, @brittany_broski. The Harry Styles fan is a basement comedy queen (beaming to 5.9 million followers from her Texas home). She shares everything from gross-out humour (“solid doo-doos”, especially) to funny musings in her convincing British accent.
Broski is relatable, the least problematic of popular TikTok creators, and couched in between silly videos of her cosplaying as a moose or arguing for the therapeutic effects of fairy lights, she shares honest chat about struggles with depression and self-loathing. Often, she’ll drive around Dallas’ streets at night with music blaring out of her speakers, just to feel something. What she’s curated for The FACE, then, is a moody collection of tearjerkers and driving tunes for a playlist titled “Feeling: Sad <3”.
Listen to Broski’s playlist on Spotify
The Flamingos – I Only Have Eyes for You
“This is a classic. I probably heard this one when I was like nine or ten years old. This has been in a bunch of soundtracks. The more I listen to it, I’m like, holy shit, this is really sad and dark. So I picked that as the intro to the playlist. It sets the tone of this vintage retro dissociating. Feel good. We’re not real. We don’t exist.”
“I love old music. I love this era. A lot of the time, it’s men that make me feel sad. So the vibe [of this song] is perfect. I just came across the song and I was like, yeah, that’s a great song. All of his songs are just so haunting and so raw.”
“Oh, this reminds me of Tumblr. This is so Tumblr. I mean, even the fucking album artwork is like a misty, foggy street. It’s very much like it just got done raining. You’re in your car, you’re maybe at a stoplight. You want to smoke a cigarette. That’s the vibe that it gives me. I know it matches perfectly with this late-night drive feel.”
“This is giving me… I don’t know, it makes me think ‘Russian’. It’s like a slow, indie garage sound. I’m not doing 95 [miles per hour] down the highway like I’m in my small town. It’s probably 11pm, all the stores are closed and I’m just driving. I’m at a stoplight. That’s what it is.”
“I actually like the lyrics on this one. My best friend Taylor introduced me to them. She’s like the indie music queen. This guy was perfect, but I don’t know, the lyrics, like, ‘I used you as a warning sign’. All of a sudden I was like, damn! ‘I found love where it wasn’t supposed to be’ – that’s the chorus. And I was like, damn, that hits.”
Cigarettes After Sex – Dreaming of You
“The title’s pretty self-explanatory. You want something, but you can’t have it. It infiltrates your every thought. This is definitely not the playlist where I’m like, oh, yeah, I love this whole album. These are just one-off songs that I really feel.”
“Space Song and Lemon Glower are two of my favourite songs from college. They trigger me back to college, getting ready to go out, maybe having a little vibe session with my roommate… A lot of the feelings are of inadequacy, and these songs line up with feeling like the second choice and feeling lesser than for no reason.”
“I love this. It has such an ’80s vibe, like from one of those soundtracks for one of John Hughes’ movies. But the album artwork is concerning. It’s kind of satanic.”
“This song is nice. I went through their whole album, Pop Therapy. This is such a great song. It doesn’t fit the vibe of this playlist – it’s very happy. But yeah, what a cool little band. They’re not really well known on Spotify, but I really like them.”
“This is feeling very much like a dream because in my dream, said man [of my dreams] is being sweet to me and isn’t making me feel like the rest of this playlist has made me feel, so I finished it off with this one because he’s saying, I’ll be there. But guess what?! Men are never there! This is a dream.”
