Album Review: Ritual de lo Habitual — Jane’s Addiction
I had just fallen in love with Jane’s Addiction. "Nothing’s Shocking" was still fresh in my head — with “Summertime Rolls,” “Mountain Song,” “Jane Says”… all of it. It was dreamy and weird and sexy and wild in that perfect late-80s, teenage-brain way. You could float in it. You could crush to it. You could grow into it. And then two years later, we’re hanging out with our girlfriend’s corpse for three days.
I mean, I was sixteen. And “Three Days” hit like an acid trip I didn’t ask for. I had never thought about love that deeply. Not like that. It didn’t even feel like love — it looked like a horror show. Like the kind of grief that wraps itself around your brain and doesn’t let go. And I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was one of those moments where music stops being just music and turns into a portal. It forced me to ask questions I didn’t have the language for. What would I do? Could I love that hard? Could I survive that kind of loss?
The thing is, I trusted Perry. After Nothing’s Shocking, he’d earned that. So even though it felt like he was banging a corpse in the middle of a fever dream, I stayed with it. I didn’t run. I didn’t judge. I tried to understand. And it changed me. It changed how I looked at love. At death. At the meat suit we wear. It cracked open this fear I didn’t even know I had — that losing the person you love most could drive you to a place beyond sanity. It made me face that fear with him. And feel it. And carry it.
“Three Days” is manic and beautiful and terrifying. It still haunts me. The whole album does. Ritual de lo Habitual wasn’t just an album — it was a shift. A reckoning. A sacred, messy, sexual, psychedelic spiral of grief and god and desire. So yeah… this album changed my life. No exaggeration. It made me braver. It made me weirder. And it made me realize that real love might hurt like hell — but it’s worth staying present for the ride.
All the best,
Penny Piper
