Can Music Become a Diary for Our Memories?
Rin Raccoon’s Scorpio Moon turns grief, rage, desire and surrender into a record of the things we don’t want to lose.
There are some kinds of love that don’t end when a person is gone. They simply have nowhere to go. There is no next conversation, no message you haven’t replied to yet and no future afternoon when you’ll unexpectedly hear their voice again. The relationship stops moving forward, but the love doesn’t necessarily stop with it. So what do you do with everything that’s left?
We keep photographs. We save messages. We hold onto objects that would mean absolutely nothing to anybody else. We tell stories because every time we tell them, some tiny part of that person seems to exist again.
But perhaps music can do something slightly different. Perhaps music can become a diary for the things that are much harder to write down.
For Rin Raccoon, Scorpio Moon feels like that kind of record.
At the heart of the album is remembrance. Several of its songs preserve the memory of Rin’s late best friend and her son, giving the record a weight that reaches far beyond ordinary heartbreak. These aren’t simply subjects being written about. By putting those memories into music, they become part of something that can be returned to, replayed and experienced again.
An ordinary diary can tell us what happened on a particular day. Music can sometimes remind us what that day felt like. A melody can become connected to a person, a lyric can hold a thought we were unable to say at the time, and a song can preserve an emotion long after the circumstances around it have changed.
That makes an album like Scorpio Moon more than a collection of songs. In some ways, it becomes an emotional record of the person who made it.
And those emotions aren’t always comfortable.
Grief doesn’t always sound sad. Sometimes grief has teeth.
The feminine rage running through Scorpio Moon feels inseparable from its loss. Anger can come from protection, frustration and helplessness, or from finally understanding wounds that once seemed impossible to explain. Grief and rage aren’t necessarily opposites. Sometimes they’re different expressions of the same love, and music gives both of them permission to exist without requiring either to be explained away.
This is also where Scorpio Moon becomes more complicated, because its musical diary doesn’t stop with the memories we might expect someone to preserve. Alongside death, loss and anger, the album records sexuality, desire and submission. These are parts of ourselves that can be considerably harder to document honestly, particularly when desire comes with vulnerability.
There is something powerful about putting what you want into a song. Once it exists there, it has been admitted. Desire no longer has to be something hidden or apologised for, and submission can be explored as something more complicated than simply giving up power.
There is a difference between having control taken away and deliberately choosing to place it into somebody else’s hands. For someone accustomed to carrying emotional weight, protecting others and remaining strong, surrender doesn’t necessarily mean weakness. It can mean trust.
That tension runs throughout Scorpio Moon. The desire to maintain control can exist alongside wanting to release it, just as the instinct to protect doesn’t remove the desire to experience being protected. Anger can exist alongside tenderness and strength can exist alongside vulnerability. Music doesn’t demand that Rin chooses which one is the “real” version of herself. It allows all of them onto the same record.
Perhaps that’s another reason music makes such an interesting diary.
We like our memories to form a story. We look backwards and create neat chapters, deciding who we were then and who we became afterwards. But that isn’t really how people work. We contradict ourselves constantly. The person we were yesterday doesn’t disappear simply because we’ve discovered something new about ourselves today.
An album can preserve those contradictions.
The title Scorpio Moon becomes a fitting image for all of this. Scorpio is a water sign, and the music lives in deep water. Grief can pull downward, desire can create its own undertow, memories disappear beneath the surface before unexpectedly returning, and anger can change the current around everything. Above it all sits the moon, quietly pulling at the tide.
Perhaps that’s why this doesn’t feel like an album about reaching the other side of grief and emerging healed, uncomplicated and complete. Maybe there isn’t really another side. Maybe acceptance is learning to live with the different parts of ourselves without demanding that one of them wins.
And perhaps that’s what makes records like Scorpio Moon important to the people who create them. Years from now, a song can still be played. The circumstances surrounding its creation may have changed completely, but something remains captured inside it. The person who wrote it can hear who they were, what they loved, what they wanted, what made them angry and who they were afraid of forgetting.
We cannot stop the people we love from eventually becoming memories, but we can decide what we do with the memories they leave behind. We can tell their stories, carry pieces of them forward and create something new from what remains.
A photograph can preserve the way someone looked. A message can preserve something they once said.
Maybe music can preserve the way it all felt.
And sometimes an album becomes somewhere for that love to live.
Released August 26, 2026.
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