Kristina Wilson Looks Beyond the Disorder with Debut Album Dating Broken Boys

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Issue #3

By the time you press play on Kristina Wilson's debut album Dating Broken Boys, you'll know that you're in for something better than just another set of indie break-up songs. The Australian singer-songwriter has taken her Forestville apartment break-up session and planted it in a richly textured album half insightful observation, half confession, and half sarcastic humor. It's all about bad habits, self-destruction, and relief from laughing at oneself when the tears dry.

The album takes its title from Kristina's world constructed with Dumbitchitis, the acerbic single with indie-pop group Like Angels. The song, cheekily titled, and its painfully real lyrics about lingering too long in the bad love affair, is the thesis of the album: we all fall for things, occasionally for the people who don't deserve them, and the result is both tragic and comic. "It's like if you've got a love infection when you're in love with somebody — or in love with who they are," Kristina explained the song, saying it was too ridiculous and too true to be left out of a song.

Dating Broken Boys seems to have come out of all those same moments — late-night cheap wine talks, sobbing to strangers who temporarily turn into overnight therapists, lengthy texts on your phone that you will never send. Kristina's writing is like a bedroom whisper but with the sting of a barbed-wire fence, the one that will leave you laughing at how damn ridiculous love makes us.

Musically, the album combines indie-pop, alt-folk, and rocks of inspiration into a paintbox that's fresh yet old. You get to hear the raw reality of Phoebe Bridgers, block anecdote politeness of Julia Jacklin, and rhythmic push of HAIM, but Kristina is not riding on her idols' coattails — she's carving out her own strip. Co-produced by Ethan Saunders and Ian Mehrle, the album weighs lean, folk-strained arrangements against larger moments that punch like a live show closer.

It's the type of arrival that doesn't only guarantee a career but that heralds an artist who's already a hell of a lot smarter than she needs to be. While other newcomers dance around genericities, Kristina Wilson plays for keeps. Her songs don't shy away from calling out the dirty things — the message you never should've sent, the ex you just can't help returning to, the stinging realization you weren't ever in love so much as addicted to drama.

Albums such as these cannot help but compare to pop culture icons. If Bridgers provided us with Punisher as the post-shift self-doubt playlist, and Olivia Rodrigo penned SOUR as the car scream during puberty, then Dating Broken Boys is in the middle ground — a rawly honest diary that still will not stop winking at you. It has the bite of Fleabag’s monologues and the bittersweet humor of a Greta Gerwig film, packaged in hooks you’ll hum long after.

Kristina has stated that she wished the record to have a mirror or friend quality about it, and she's achieved it. These songs are not written from a pedestal; they're written from the floor, cross-legged with you, laughing through the pain and scheming the next move. It's catharsis that doesn't get heavy-handed, healing that doesn't attempt to sound neat.

Dating Broken Boys is out October 4 on all platforms. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at your own poor choices while secretly queuing up another sad-girl playlist, Kristina Wilson has made the album for you.

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