At long last, Los Angeles act Love Ghost has finally revealed their dazzling new record, thirteen. Boasting raw, introspective singles such as “Turpentine This House,” “Blood & Roses,” and “Filthy Hands,” Love Ghost has crafted a true must-listen record. From transcendent emo vocals and haunting storytelling to moody grunge guitar lines and acoustic strums, all listeners will find parts of themselves mirrored in this project.
“Thirteen is probably the most vulnerable record I’ve ever made. 13 is the age I was expelled from school, and was the age where I started to feel like I didn’t belong, notes frontman Finnegan Bell. “I think a lot of this record comes from that feeling of always being on the outside looking in. It’s an acoustic midwest grunge album about isolation, identity, and trying to find something beautiful in the uglier parts of life. It feels like a collection of memories that I probably should’ve buried.”
Check out the dazzling album below, and check out Bell’s track-by-track of all 13 tracks as the vocalist describes the young memories, uphill battles, and familial grief that helped craft the record.
Church for a Vampire
It’s about finding something sacred in people and places that are completely fucked up. It’s a song about loneliness and looking for salvation in all the wrong places.
Pasadena
I grew up in the Pasadena/Altadena area. and this song is deeply personal to me because there’s a lot of love, pain, memory and ghosts tied to those streets for me. It’s less of a song about a city and more a song about trying to make peace with where you came from.
Into The Woods
This song is a metaphor for losing one’s innocence and realizing the world isn’t as simple as you once thought. It’s about that moment where you cross a line that you can’t un-cross, and suddenly childhood feels like something that happened to somebody else.
Turpentine This House
Turpentine is what’s in products used to clean out stains, but if you use it the wrong way it’s super dangerous—like trying to erase a stain from something that happened to you, but it hurts almost as much to try and get rid of it than it does to keep it. I talk specifically about a love I had for someone that wasn’t mutual, and the Eaton fire and what my experience was with it in 2025.
Can’t Run Forever
Is a song about finally facing what made you the way you are. It’s about reflecting on your trauma and everything that has led you to become the person that you are today.
Am I Evil?
This is a song about questioning your own morals and the narrator inside your head when you have intrusive thoughts. It’s about feeling estranged inside your own mind due to the thoughts that you have.
Something in the Water
Is one of the album’s most emotionally charged songs, confronting the weight of generational trauma in a town caught in a cycle of inherited pain. It explores forgotten Americana and the ways addiction, depression, abuse, and other wounds are passed down through communities, replaying the sins of previous generations. The song is my attempt to reckon with that darkness and the people who are left carrying it.
Snake Boy
Is the beginning of a three-song trilogy on the record, with “Blood and Roses” and “Dog Teeth and Rosaries” following directly after it. Together, the three songs tell a story about intimacy, danger, desire, betrayal, and revenge, loosely built around the mythology of the forbidden fruit—the apple, Adam and Eve, and the serpent. “Snake Boy” introduces that world through the eyes of the serpent, using the sounds of a running film projector and snakes slithering throughout the track to create the feeling of watching something forbidden unfold on screen. The song is overtly sensual, but there is something unsettling underneath it; the narrator is drawn toward danger and desire at the same time, setting up the complicated relationship at the center of the trilogy.
Blood and Roses
That tension carries directly into “Blood and Roses,” the focus track of the record and perhaps one of its catchiest songs. On the surface, it is a love song, but there is a danger and sexuality running underneath its sweetness—it feels seductive, reckless, and strangely polite all at once. The chorus captures that contradiction: “Meet me at the dark end of the street, pull me closer. I don’t care who’s watching, would you like to move to the back of the Jeep? Say my name like it’s the only thing you need.” It is the moment where desire takes over, and the forbidden relationship established in “Snake Boy” becomes impossible to ignore.
Dog Teeth and Rosaries
The trilogy closes with “Dog Teeth and Rosaries,” which shifts the story from seduction into betrayal and revenge. The transition is intentionally cinematic: at the end of “Blood and Roses,” you can hear someone turning the dial of a car radio, which leads directly into the final song of the trilogy. “Dog Teeth and Rosaries” sounds as though it was recorded onto a ’90s cassette tape, giving the song a degraded, intimate quality that feels like a memory being uncovered years after the fact. Taken together, the three songs function almost like a short film—the serpent finds the forbidden fruit, desire turns into love, and love ultimately curdles into betrayal and revenge.
Pointless
Tells the story of a hero’s journey with an unexpected twist: the villain isn’t an outside force—it’s the protagonist himself. The song explores the internal battle of living with depression, confronting your own mind, and ultimately rejecting society’s expectations in favor of living authentically. At its core, “Pointless” is about the realization that sometimes the hardest battle isn’t against the world, but against the version of yourself that the world has taught you to become. The song follows that journey from isolation and self-doubt toward self-acceptance, asking what it really means to be the hero of your own story.
I Left My Home
Is actually inspired by family members of mine who have seen war. The song explores the psychological aftermath of war and the disorienting experience of trying to return to a life that no longer feels like home. Built around a sample of a Marine military chant, the song follows a young man who sets out on a journey far from home, searching for a way to overcome something he can’t fully understand or put into words. As the story unfolds, the physical distance he travels becomes a reflection of the distance he feels within himself. Even after returning home, he remains haunted by the war he left behind, caught between where he is and where his mind keeps taking him.
Filthy Hands
The song looks at the complicated reality of damaged people carrying the consequences of what was done to them, while still finding beauty and humanity beneath the pain. Dark and deeply intimate, it confronts the silence surrounding trauma and the brutal truth of what happens when someone learns to hide their wounds rather than speak about them.
