1st May 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
It’s a strange world. Especially the one of music, where, residing in York, I receive a promo pitch from a PR in Madison County, Illinois, for an artist based in Sheffield, where I studied for my PhD and worked for some time after. It’s about an hour away by train, yet the music of IAmImperfect had to travel halfway across the planet and back to land in my inbox.
Their latest offering is sold as being for fans of Solar Fake, The Birthday Massacre, Faderhead, Depeche Mode, ‘and just a little bit of Iron Maiden’. How’s that for a hybrid, eh? There’s certainly a fair bit going on across the EP’s five tracks. ‘Surviving Is Not Living’ makes for a bold opener, spanning almost seven minutes and riding in on an atmospheric intro which brings together electronica and prog with sweeping synths, stuttering beats and – wait for it – a soaring guitar solo, before getting down to more conventional darkwave with an anthemic pop leaning.
‘The Fallen’ manages to perfectly balance driving beats and pumping pop form with a sense of deep melancholy, and this, in many ways, encapsulates the essence of the work. As they explain it, ‘Ghosts represents the awful feelings nagging at you, never leaving you a moment of peace. Whether it’s the pressure to make yourself fit in with your peers, the competitor who is always doing it better, or the constant reminder of how everyone else is coping and you really can’t… Ghosts is about trying to live your life while everything else fights for your attention. It pulls you down, pushes you to conform, and drags you back into the dark. It is about what it takes to keep going anyway, as the world around us continues to spiral. Ghosts represents moments of quiet introspection along with flashes of hope and bursts of frustration’.
These are complex and conflicting emotions, not easily articulable. And what Ghosts does is navigate these nuances from a range of angles, but wrapped in an accessible pop-tinged package. The stomping beats of ‘Conversion Therapy’ are very much late 80s disco, while the synth lead is more 90s dance in origin, and if ‘Solitary Shell’ is sonically euphoric, lyrically it’s altogether darker.
A part of me struggles to reconcile these paradoxical positions, in that I expect dark emotional states to be paired with dark musical accompaniment. I acknowledge that there’s no real reason for this. Sure, when experiencing a dark mood, I will delve into overtly dark music, but it’s very much my own short-circuiting which finds if difficult to extrapolate dark moods from more uptempo tunes, despite being abundantly aware that ‘Emma’ by Hot Chocolate is one of the bleakest songs lyrically, in contrast to the slick disco groove of the backing.
The EP’s final track, ‘Ghosts of the Past’, is evocative, brooding, the lyrics dark, anguished, and the slow- to mid-tempo and rippling synth backing reflects the mood perfectly. And just as we’re plodding along, heads down, a blistering guitar solo break out. It’s a different kind of mood articulation, a fleeting moment of escapism, even. But this is the beauty of Ghosts. Just like moods, it switches unexpectedly, in an instant. One moment you’re laughing uncontrollably, the next the tears are flowing, almost inexplicably. IAmImperfect have forged a suite of songs which capture this contradictory psychological conundrum.
AA
Aural Aggravation 