The Bad Penny (beta)

Paper Girl, the Nashville-based emo/folk-punk project led by Sarah Gargano, has just put out the final single ahead of the release of a new album next month. It’s called “Ohio (Fall 2016),” and the video for it exclusively premieres today on The Bad Penny.

Paper Girl was also the title of Gargano’s first single, which itself referenced the John Green book Paper Towns. The new video for “Ohio (Fall 2016)” features the whimsical song playing as the artist bikes to a field, where she sits down and plays the song with a beaming smile on a sunny day. In addition to recalling the days of yore when her music was primarily of the emo variety, one can’t help but be reminded of the ongoing 2016 nostalgia meme, fueled in part by a Gen Z’s longing for pre-COVID days.

” ‘Ohio (Fall 2016)’ is a song I wrote from my high school boyfriend’s perspective about watching me go to college in Ohio and have fun without him after breaking up,” Gargano told The Bad Penny. “It’s probably the folkiest/cutesiest song on the album and the most similar to the songs I was releasing under my actual name.

She continued: “I made the music video with my friends Claire Fellow [who filmed and directed the clip] and Conner Getchell during the superbloom in Nashville. I wanted to include a decent amount of songs that reference my time living in Ohio as well to nod to my connection to the Midwest emo genre and the area as a whole. I also included a house in the cover art (for the single ‘I Think We’re Gonna Miss This’ and the album itself), as that’s become sort of a meme within that genre.”

Anticipation for the Paper Girl album began building as early as last year. When The Bad Penny and the artist touched base in December, she had recorded 14 songs in three days. The album, titled The Party Was Already Dying Out and is due in mid-October, is planning to be bolstered by five singles and three videos. The second, “Buzzkill,” came out in November. Here’s the video for it:

Find more info and releases by Gargano, head to her website, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

For more recent Bad Penny exclusives, check out:

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This entry was posted on 09/21/2026 at 7:03 am and is filed under Exclusives, Interviews, Videos with tags emo, Paper Girl, Sarah Gargano. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.