Content warning: mental illness and suicide.
Musician Lex Walton’s 2023 indie rock album “I WANT YOU TO KILL ME,” an expression of abuse, unsafe Internet use as a minor, identity turmoil and suicidality, has found the love of online music listeners looking for niche art. Many of these digital audience members can find aspects of this extremely and jarringly confessional album to relate to and identify with Walton’s struggles. While it’s great to have art that can comfort or educate you, listeners of “I WANT YOU TO KILL ME” need to understand that they do not actually know Lex Walton, or any artist they haven’t personally talked to, despite how revealing art can be. They need to know these artists’ minds can be different than how they present themselves, and stop feeding delusions of mutual understanding.
Lex Walton was certainly confessional prior to creating her 2023 magnum opus, but seemingly threw out the filter to record “I WANT YOU TO KILL ME.”. Walton takes heavy inspiration from indie rock band Car Seat Headrest (primarily their hit album “Twin Fantasy”) to create a cathartic and vulnerable piece of art about one woman’s mental fight to live in all its ugliness.
Walton acknowledges on the first song of the album, “The Greek Tragedy In Action,” that struggling with depression and suicide transcends time and space entirely. As such, even people in prehistory can struggle and display information about what they’re going through. The people of the future will do the same. Walton claims that, although the circumstances are different for every human being, her struggles are neither the first nor the last.
What makes art worthy of preserving and sharing is its impact on those who experience it. Walton is incredibly aware of this and assures the audience directly on the penultimate track, “Southland Tales,” that although there are similarities, they are not the same. She says that the audience’s life will continue whereas her story ends when the album is over. If Walton didn’t believe in her art’s ability to comfort others, she wouldn’t have released something so personal.
But her voice and instrument playing is only that to the audience: art, or a fragment of her complex psyche. This is evident in how Walton portrays her voice to be the art and not her person. Art is not meant to be conflated for the actual artist behind it since, like the audience, the artist can change over time and lie.
It should be understood that this album is an extension of her but does not define her identity. This is why it’s crucial for her audience, as well as people who engage with art in general, to understand what it means to be parasocial in an age where one-sided relationships with artists are increasingly common, exacerbated by social media.
The term “parasocial” was originally coined as a sociological term in 1956 and has an impact that’s still being researched as the world changes. It went as far as to be Cambridge Dictionary’s word of 2025 due to its stark, almost unavoidable presence in our lives.
The parasociability that most people refer to isn’t the casual entertainment-social type, which everyone around art is bound to indulge in, but rather the intense-personal and, in extreme cases, the borderline-pathological. Intense-personal gives the illusion of a relationship with this party typically knowing they don’t know you, whereas borderline-pathological is taken to such an extreme you have fantasies and even delusions of satisfying the relationship.
Parasociability could potentially be used as a tool for personal good, but it can also be extremely dangerous when unchecked. While it can help with becoming more empathetic to others’ emotions and battling loneliness, it can also make people reject reality. Some people with intense parasocial relationships react negatively towards people who don’t like or understand the art the same way they do, getting defensive for people who don’t know they exist.
Walton develops these parasocial feelings in most of the audience and uses them for an artistic statement and an emotionally moving result. It is undoubtedly and authentically human. But we are more than the past solidified in art. We are so nuanced and complex that we cannot ever truly be replicated if we have something unique to say.
As long as there is a need for art, there will inevitably be parasocial relationships. Lex Walton and so many other artists use art to comfort people in their present and future like how they needed to be comforted. As Walton said on “Greek Tragedy In Action,” “our pain is not eradicated, but shared.” But the audience and the artist are separate individuals. Art is selected expressions of some stories out of billions crying to be told. The artist’s is just the most accessible and preserved. Art gives people opportunities to improve their own lives, but we need to understand that we don’t truly know the artist’s own complexities.