|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This album was a massive deal for me at the time. I was finally just being myself. This was shortly after I had rebranded to do just that, it was a slow process but I think releasing this was the biggest milestone in that. In terms of music, everything I had made before this was a kind of cinematic ambient narrative that had nothing to do with me and usually followed some character through some traumatic event. Ultimately at their core I think they were always still just me trying to explore different emotions and feelings that I couldn't quite put into words, but this time it was me. |
This was my first musical project directly about me. It moves through emotional chaos and self-awareness in that sense. Thereās sarcasm and sincerity tangled up together here, like someone trying to laugh through a breakdown. It's not as angry or mad as my later stuff would go on to be, but it's more raw. An honest personal, vulnerable reflection.
I wasnāt sure how to begin, so I started with the wider idea and then tried to condense it. Just a mood. A breath before everything crashes in. Itās not a grand statementājust me setting the stage. I always like to build a relevant feeling of what the album is about in the intro track, because ultimately I know that the only people who listen to them are those who intend on listening through the whole album. So I really tried to use it to make the tension and atmosphere build for a greater payoff. If I were to try and make this as profoundly pretentious as possible, the song is essentially a riser, a long build up. Which is exactly what my life had felt like up until this point.
This one came from that weird pressure to keep it together when everything inside feels completely wrong. What's stranger is that a lot of the time the pressure was coming from me. To not seem cringe, to show no real interest or passion in anything just in case I came off as "autistic". I donāt even know what ānormalā means, but I had been trying to fake it for such a long time. This track is me breaking that illusion a little. All I know now is that I definitely don't want to "be normal".
This was written from a place of numbness, honestly. Like when everything feels pointless but youāre too tired to make a scene about it. Scum Alice brought in this raw, distant kind of energy that made it feel like two people spiraling in sync, but separately. I love their music so much, honestly everything they do has this kind of raw artistic honesty that I'm incredibly jealous of. I admire them so much and I'm eternally greatful for this.
Itās kind of a joke title, kind of not. I wanted to treat sadness like a classical compositionālike maybe if I structured it properly, it wouldnāt feel so messy and difficult. It didnāt work, but the music helped me pretend it made sense for a few minutes. Kind of like the album as a whole, just me trying to turn my emotions and angst into a kind of symphony, to give it purpose or reason. So it was composed like a classical piece.
Pretty literal. This oneās about being afraid of pain but always being drawn to the edge of it. Itās dark but also a little childlike in its honesty. I hate knives, don't like looking at them, don't even like being around them. Don't like the things they make me think. There was a deliberate attempt in here to make the sound sharp in that sense, there's a 303 acid line with stupidly high resonance. I used punchy processed drums and samples of pained grunts.
This oneās sarcastic, mostly. But thereās a sadness under it too. Like telling yourself to smile because youāre supposed toābut it doesnāt reach your eyes, and you know it wonāt fix anything even if it did. It's a trance song written in a major key so it's happy in concept but I broke that with a dark soundscape and harsh breaks. It's quite a long song that goes through a kind of roller coaster of changes, I think there's like 3 different melodies in whole track. At the time I thought I was doing something with the different ways the title could be interpreted, like how trying to smile could be a sign of strength but also pretty pathetic, or sad.
Definitely not the best day ever. This titleās a lie on purpose. The track is a meltdown covered in glitterātrying to make it sound like a celebration when itās actually the opposite. Itās the sound of pretending too hard. This was the first track I finished on this album and so in my mind it's "the anthem", the essence of what I set out to do.
Guilt is something I feel a lot, itās heavy and this songās about that weight. Specifically when it comes to the stuff I do online. I didnāt know where to put it, so I make a mountain out of it. I always feel like a fraud, like I shouldn't be here, like I shouldn't have done as much as I have. Like I shouldn't continue to do it. That nothing I make is original or has any value to anyone. That by continuing to make stuff I'm just "polluting" the internet (even more than it already is polluted). To reflect that I shamelessly leant into it. I started with one of my favourite songs "B with XTC by DJ kuroneko", and tried to recreate it from the ground up using my own composition (lmao). I saw the song as representing something I would never be good enough to make myself.
I was on it when I wrote this. Or maybe I had just gone off it. Itās about that weird emotional limbo where youāre not sure if youāre getting better or just different. I wanted the track to feel like the drug, kind of detached, like watching your own life from a distance.
The song has two parts and maybe it's too on the nose in that respect, but I think it says what it needs to. It starts dark and angry, in a minor key before transitioning very gradually into a brighter song in a major key but it's still very obviously a chaotic mess. It's not a happy song at any point but the second half offers a distant blurred take on the first half. The same song but chemically forced into a "brighter, happier" shape whether it wants it or not.
I didnāt finish the title on purpose. That cutoff says more than the words do. Itās about rage that burns out before you even understand it. I was furious when I made thisābut also exhausted. Itās about me. Every time I start working on an album I have every intention of making it as experimental and daring as possible, then just end up being too scared and playing it way safer than I wanted to. I always regret it. For that reason I always end up cramming the experimental stuff at the end. If it means anything, if I could do it again every song would be more like sertraline. But it is what it is and I think my music has a strange disjointed feeling to it because of that. And that's something that I think makes it unique. In that sense there's both anger in this track and optimism.
This project came from a really unsteady place. Some of itās serious, some of it exaggerated for effect, some of it I donāt fully understand even now. Itās a messy snapshot of what happens when you try to hold it together for too long and finally stop pretending. Not a resolutionājust a release and I think it succeeds in being that, so I'm happy with it.
Something I feel like I need to address is the "sewerslvt" allegations.
I hope that it seems as ridiculous now as it was at the time but for those who don't know; I faced pretty harsh backlash when this dropped from people who thought it was a rip-off of their work. To this day I'm not really sure what they think I'm ripping off exactly but honestly, I think it's just a complete coincidence that one of their albums just so happened to be popular at the time.
I've avoided talking about this until now because of that. Now that it's kind of passed, I think it's obvious it has nothing to do with them at all.
Stylistically this album is just my older stuff but at a tempo of 165ish with more jungle/dnb styled breaks. I'm not a big sewerslvt fan at all to be honest, the only track of theirs I like is Kawaii Razorblades and even then that whole thing was written by Yandere. As mentioned previously, if anyone this album was inspired by DJ Kuroneko which is really ironic looking back. No shade to those who do enjoy their stuff, it's just that dnb predates them by 30 years and there's so many other artists that I actually did take inspiration from.
Peace xx
