Photographs

There is a specific kind of torment that belongs entirely to this era: lying awake at 2am, phone in hand, watching your past unspool in a series of tiny squares. Old photographs, profile pages, captions from a life that no longer exists. The memories are right there, impossibly close, and yet the person they document has become a stranger. "Photographs," the penultimate track on Cannons’ 2026 album Everything Glows, lives entirely inside that moment. It is a portrait of the freshly heartbroken, surrounded by digital and physical relics of someone they used to love, caught in the loop of looking back.

A Messy Apartment, a Familiar Pain

Michelle Joy described the emotional premise of the song in clear terms: the listener is placed inside the apartment of someone who has just had their heart broken. The space is a mess. Objects everywhere serve as evidence of a shared life now dissolved. Joy noted that the song is “visually descriptive in a way that we haven’t done before” compared to the band’s earlier work^[1]. The song earns its intimacy by refusing abstraction.

The heartbreak is not presented as a single dramatic rupture. Instead, it accumulates across small details, a domestic archaeology of love that did not survive. The narrator is not moving on. They are, for now, standing very still in the rubble.

Written During a Season of Loss

“Photographs” arrived during one of the most turbulent periods in Michelle Joy’s life. While the band was writing and recording what would become Everything Glows, Joy was navigating serious health challenges including fatigue, an anemia diagnosis, and surgery, alongside the personal upheaval of a divorce^[2]. The band ultimately wrote 16 songs during this stretch before narrowing the record to 11 tracks^[3]. That kind of abundance in the face of difficulty speaks to something important about how Cannons processed the period: not by stepping back from emotion, but by running straight into it.

The Everything Glows project was described by the band as being about “remembering” the light that darkness makes you forget. “Photographs” occupies a specific position in that arc. It is not yet the remembering. It is the moment before, when the darkness is still total and the light is still a rumor. Coming near the end of the album, it functions as the deepest point of the descent before the final track offers something like release.

The Particular Cruelty of Digital Memory

What makes “Photographs” feel distinctly contemporary is its engagement with how social media and smartphones have permanently altered the experience of loss. In earlier eras, you could box up the photographs, delete the voicemails, and slowly let the past go quiet. The archive would fade. Now the archive is infinite and frictionless. A past relationship exists in your phone with the same accessibility as your calendar. You can reach it at any moment and with essentially no effort.

The song captures the specific behavior of doomscrolling through old images and social media profiles, revisiting fragments of something that no longer exists but remains stubbornly, painfully present^[1]. This is not nostalgia in the warm, soft sense. It is more like pressing on a bruise. The narrator keeps coming back to the photographs not because they want to feel bad, but because the looking feels, in some twisted way, like connection. Like the other person is still somehow reachable.

Joy has discussed this dimension of the song as a reflection of how technology mediates modern grief. The tools meant to help you stay connected become instruments of self-inflicted hurt in the aftermath of a relationship^[1]. What starts as innocent remembering can spiral into hours of excavation, each image a small wound reopened.

Cannons and the Art of Emotional Honesty

This kind of unflinching emotional honesty has long been a hallmark of Cannons’ songwriting, but it reaches a particular peak on Everything Glows. The band, which formed in Los Angeles in 2013 after guitarist Ryan Clapham and keyboardist Paul Davis recruited vocalist Joy through a Craigslist posting, built their sound on a foundation of dreamy synth-pop inflected with 80s nostalgia^[4]. Their breakthrough came in 2020 when “Fire for You” was placed in Netflix’s Never Have I Ever and climbed to number one on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart^[5], establishing them as significant figures in the current indie-pop landscape.

Joy has spoken about her songwriting process as instinctual and open-ended: she often begins with lines she does not fully understand, treating them like mantras and trusting that meaning will surface over time^[6]. “Photographs” feels like the product of exactly that approach. The song has the quality of something discovered rather than constructed, a feeling captured before it could be reasoned away.

Why This Song Connects

"Photographs" resonates because it validates an experience that most people would be reluctant to admit to. The compulsive, late-night scrolling through someone else’s old posts, the ritualistic return to images that offer nothing but pain: these are not behaviors most people discuss openly. They carry a faint embarrassment, a suggestion that a healthier person would simply move on.

Cannons refuse that judgment. The song holds space for the behavior without pathologizing it, treating the compulsion as a natural, deeply human response to grief. There is something important in that refusal to editorialize. The narrator is not advised to put down the phone. They are simply seen.

That quality of witness is something critics have identified as central to the Everything Glows album as a whole. The record has been described as radiating “a sense of camaraderie, of bearing witness to one another through travails and triumphs”^[3]. “Photographs” is perhaps the purest expression of that ethos: a song that does not comfort so much as accompany.

Other Ways In

While the song maps most obviously onto romantic heartbreak, it accommodates other readings without strain. The imagery of being surrounded by the artifacts of a vanished person also speaks to grief after death, the kind of loss that is permanent rather than just painful. The apartment full of reminders could belong to anyone who has lost someone irretrievably.

There is also a reading that centers less on the other person and more on the self. The photographs being revisited are also images of the narrator at a different moment: younger, presumably happier, certainly less alone. In that sense, the doomscrolling is not only about someone else. It is about the version of yourself that existed inside that relationship, who no longer exists in quite the same way. The loss is doubled.

Finding a Place in the Album's Arc

Positioned as the tenth of eleven tracks on Everything Glows, “Photographs” occupies the emotional center of gravity before the album makes its final move toward resolution. The record’s title announces its ultimate destination: everything glows, meaning that even the darkest periods carry some latent light. But the album earns that message by not rushing toward it. Songs like “Photographs” insist on sitting with the pain long enough to actually feel it.

That structural patience is part of what makes Everything Glows feel like a mature and unified statement rather than a collection of singles. The album understands that healing is not linear. You go all the way down before you come back up. “Photographs” is the bottom of the descent, and it is necessary.

In the end, what lingers about “Photographs” is not sadness but recognition. The song catches you in an act you thought was private and, without flinching or judging, reflects it back to you with warmth and clarity. That is a harder thing to do than it looks. Cannons make it sound almost easy.