Posts Tagged ‘bleak’

Great Falls – Objects Without Pain

Posted: 22 September 2023 in Albums
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Neurot Recordings – 15th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Once upon a time, way back, I’m confident I read an interview with the artist Francis Bacon which contained the phrase ‘life is pain’. It certainly sounds like one of his brutally bleak and precisely pithy lines, encapsulating his eternally dark world view, but I can’t for the life of me find it anywhere, at least not attributed to Bacon. It’s a phrase which seems to have acquired an online ubiquity to the point that it’s simply something people say now. People say all kinds of nonsense, though. I had a work colleague who would often wheel out the line that ‘pain is weakness leaving the body.’ He was an imbecile, and that’s not how it works or I’d be Hercules by now.

In this context, the concept of objects without pain is almost inconceivable. No pain? Oh, to be inanimate… But as the accompanying notes soon render apparent, Great Falls’ fourth album is a work which plunders a whole world of pain: ‘Objects Without Pain takes us on a bleak, purgative journey through a separation – a snapshot of the turmoil and indecision that occurs after the initial realization of someone’s misery, and before the ultimate decision to end a decades-long partnership. From the foreboding intro riffs of ‘Dragged Home Alive’ to the end of the 13-minute closer ‘Thrown Against The Waves,’ its eight tracks explore the thoughts that come up when a person is staring down the barrel of blowing up their life: How did this happen? Is it too late for a new life? Will the kid be OK? What will make me happier: familiar torment or unknown freedom?’

This is dark, alright. And it’s weighty, but not always in the most obvious sense. Indeed, the nine-minute opener, ‘Dragged Home Alive’ begins with nothing but a clean guitar, strummed scratchily. But then the vocals, a pure howl of anguish, tell us this is not some mellow folksy effort, and from there it builds, and when the bass and drums kick in, it’s nothing short of explosive. The drums are fast, nuanced, dynamic, almost jazzy, while the bass is thick and squirmy, it’s the sound of a snake wrestling to escape the hold of a human, and everything comes together with such fiery force you feel dizzy, whiplashed, battered from every angle – then the second half is almost another song; still slow, still heavy, but with a very different sound and level of energy, and it fucking pummels. This is powerful stuff.

They keep the riffs coming thereafter, too, as they deliver obliterative volume and endless anguish and emotional torment of a failed relationship and its fallout. It’s not pretty or poetic, but the internal monologue and the conflict laid out straight in real-time, churning through questions of blame and sifting through belongings, bald vignettes and depictions of packing, moving.

I spend my day

Searching homes

And I can be

Alone for real

I spend my day

Searching towns

And I can be

Searching alone

And I can be

Searching alone

I can’t do this

It hits hard because it’s so, so raw, so real, so much a real voice, unfiltered and rendered overtly lyrical. And because of this, rather than in spite of, the lyrics are true poetry. The pain is real, and you feel it.

‘Born as an Argument’ is considered, slow, dolorous, but also raw and ragey, and with its double-pedal drumming, it’s heavy-hitting. Even winding down to soft, almost folky vocals to fade, the heavy mood lingers, and then ‘Old Words Worn Thin’ crashes in with lumbering bass and vocals screaming anguish. The bass that crunches is at bowel-level on ‘Ceilings Inch Closer’ is the definition of energy, channelling all of the negativity and conflicting emotions into something so sonically solid the impact is physical.

As a label, Neurot has a knack for finding bands which are ‘like’ Neurosis but different, with Kowloon Walled City recent standouts for their brand of stark, bleak, nihilistic heft, and, on the same pile, Great Falls. Only, while sharing that heavy nihilism and the roaring rage of Unsane, they stand apart from so much of the label roister by virtue of their sheer force and absence of breathing spaces. Breathing is for wimps. Suck it up and plough on. Bathe in the brutality of Great Falls. Absorb the pain, and grow stronger for it.

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Pound Land – Violence

Posted: 17 September 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 29th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Following the stop-gap video release of ‘Liar’ from their singles compilation, Manchester’s most miserable are back with another long-player.

For their sixth album, they promise ‘eight filthy tracks of vitriolic desperation’ on a set that ‘often veers towards a nineties alt-metal/industrial sound, along with the usual smatterings of customary Pound Land abstraction…In addition, this new album continues to aggressively push lyrical themes relating to the same old shit that seems to be getting worse: corporate hegemony, business culture, mainstream media influence, automation, class polarisation and economic austerity.’

I sit in the dim, narrow ‘spare bedroom’ that is the office where I work my day-job by day and write reviews by night, slumped, exhausted by life. I moved into this house ten years ago, and while I was fortunate to be able to buy it, it was previously a magnolia-coated rental with fire doors and stain-forgiving turd brown carpets throughout. The fire doors may be gone, but my poky office which, measuring 7 feet by 12 feet, would make for a fucking tight bedroom, still had the turd-brown carpet, because when presented with the choice of food and beer or a new carpet, carpet seems like an extravagance I can survive without. I realise and appreciate that I’m fortunate: I can at least afford both food and beer.

If Pound Land’s releases seem to plough the same furrow only deeper and laced with a greater despondency, that’s largely the point. As they say, ‘the same old shit that seems to be getting worse’, and that’s the shit that’s grist to their mill. No doubt their mill will be sold off or shut down, or knocked down to make way for a hotel or flats before long, but for the time being at least, they’re still plugging away. And thank fuck they are.

Yes, there is a rising swell of music that’s telling it like it is: if Sleaford Mods led the way, it’s been a slow trickle rather than an opening of the floodgates in their wake, most likely because people are too busy working overtime in their day jobs to pay the electricity bill to make music, but lately we’ve seen these guys, plus Benefits, Kill! The Icon, and Bedsit calling out the shitness of everything. And make no mistake: everything really is fucking shit, unless you’re a fucking billionaire.

‘Programmed’ barrels in with a squalling mess of grimy bass and screeching electronics reminiscent of Cruise-era Whitehouse, and it’s a sonic amalgamation that’s painful and penetrating, hitting the guts and piercing the ear drums simultaneously. The thunderous ruff buries the drums and when the snarling vocals enter the mix, spitting vitriol with blinding rage, everything combines to tear forth with a wall of nihilism that’s in the same field as Uniform. Then – what the fuck? Wild roaming saxophone sprays all over before another onslaught of rabid rage. It’s seven and a half minutes of devastating carnage that leaves you feeling hollowed out and wondering where they could possibly go from here?

More of the same, of course: grimacing and with gritted teeth, they grind, thud, trudge and bulldoze their way mercilessly through another six tracks – and half an hour – of relentlessly grey sludge, by turns angry and despondent.

Like Sleaford Mods, Pound Land’s compositions are built around monotony and repetition, but whereas the former place predominant emphasis on the lyrics, the snappy wordplay and caustic commentary, Pound Land batter and bludgeon repetitive lyrics in the way that Swans did in their early years, and their music is very much a mirror of the crushing effects of drudgery. It does articulate the gut-puling anguish of the everyday, and in the most direct way possible.

The raw, raging punk of ‘New Labour’ offers a shift in tempo, but it still sounds like it was recorded on a mobile phone left in a corner of the rehearsal room.

The majority of the album, though, is a succession of crawling dirges dominates by overloading bass. The lyrics are simple, direct – when they’re audible. ‘Fuck the facts and roll the news’ Adam Stone yells repeatedly over a bowel-busting bass growl on ‘Media Amnesia’. ‘Life is so much easier / with media amnesia,’ he spits before launching into a brutal rant – one of many.

There is absolutely no let up on Violence. It’s hard and heavy, uncompromising and unpleasant. Even sparser tracks like ‘Low Health’, where it’s more spoken word with churning noise, the atmosphere is never less than crushingly oppressive, harrowingly bleak.

The last track, ‘Violence Part 2’ is five minutes of brutal racket that’s the nastiest of lo-fi- sludge and which is the perfect encapsulation of the album as a whole. It’s grim, it’s bleak, and it’s supposed to be.

Rarely has a band so perfectly captured the zeitgeist through a horrible mess of noise that makes you physically hurt and ache and feel like you’re being subjected to an array of tortures. This is the world. This is Britain, in 2023. If you’re not a millionaire, you might as well be dead. It’s what they want. Poor, disabled? Fuck off and die. This is the grim reality of the world Pound Land present, and while that isn’t actually one of their lyrics, the bleak message is clear: we’re fucked.

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KEN mode – VOID

Posted: 31 August 2023 in Albums
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Artoffact Records – 22nd September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

VOID always seems like the most appropriate title for a counterpart to a release called NULL: it was, indeed, the title for a brace of EPs released by Foetus in the early 00s as companions to the album Gash.

But with this, the title is more than simply an extension of a theme in terms of title. As the accompanying notes explain, ‘VOID, the companion piece to last year’s NULL LP, has a decidedly more melancholy and disappointed aesthetic than its predecessor. Featuring 8 new tracks recorded and produced throughout the fall and winter of 2021 by Andrew Schneider, mastered by Carl Saff, with artwork and layouts by the band’s longtime collaborator Randy Ortiz.’

Despite now marking twenty-four years of squalling noise, tenth full-length Loved (2018) found the band hitting new peaks of intensity and gaining newfound traction, and not just because of the vaguely disturbing cover. Combining weight and ferocity, their back catalogue straddles the abyss between The Jesus Lizard and Swans. It’s fair to say, then, that KEN mode are hardly celebrated as a party band, and writing in Decibel Magazine, Shane Mehling summarises the diptych of NULL and VOID as “It’s like the first record is you fighting, and this one is you losing”.

It’s a pretty accurate summary. That is to say, VOID is pretty fucking bleak, harrowing even. ‘The Shrike’ makes for a tense and tempestuous opening, where everything blasts out all at once before sinewy guitars twist and entwine like a contraction of the intestines with the pain of food poisoning before successive deluges of noise assail the senses. The tension draws the sinews so taut as to burn, and a mere four minutes in you feel the anguish rising through the gut and your throat tightening.

Single cut ‘These Wires’ is almost accessible, a sedate intro building the tension before the levee breaks on the lung-bursting anguish. It’s eight minutes of blank fury, raging nihilism that doesn’t necessarily make you feel better. The stab at catharsis feels blunted. Confined, entrapped. It’s tense, and you feel your heartrate well. VOID is so, so, dense, the music low and churning the

Comparisons are few and largely futile in the face of this, but it’s Kowloon Walled City’s bleak, desolate forms. The disappointment emanates from every chord, every pained syllable. Life… yes, it tears you up and it crushes you.

‘We’re Small Enough’ runs in ever-tightening circles around a repetitive bass groove motif, and become wound more tightly with every loop, and then ‘I Cannot’ crashes in and it’s like you can feel the band throwing themselves headline against lead-lined walls in desperate and futile attempts to escape. Escape what? Life… ‘A Reluctance of Being’ encapsulates that sense of struggle, the weight of simply existing some days. And yet just when you think you can’t do it, and don’t think you can even get up on a morning, you do, because you simply do, and then you get through another day, and then the next. It’s like wading through treacle, but what else are you going to do? I say ‘you’ in the hope that in redirecting the personal the universal it will take on a wider resonance. But for every ‘you’, I mean me. But you know that. And this track is the most gut-wrenching brutal.

Previous single ‘He Was a Good Man, He Was a Taxpayer’ is another slow, brutal slice of pain. Another shining example of what no-one would likely consider a single, it’s a crawling slogger spanning five monolithic minutes of bludgeoning noise, angry, grey, dark, dense, relentless. VOID is the soundtrack to staring into the void, while contemplating the practicalities and the future. Is there even a future? What if I step off here? What am I looking at, what am I facing? Is there really nothing? Probably not, and we need to accept that perhaps the end is the end.

VOID stands on the edge and looks down. Perhaps this is it. Perhaps there is more. VOID doesn’t offer hope, but it does provide a backdrop to your existential crisis while leaving you gasping for air.

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Lee Riley – From Here We are Nowhere

Posted: 27 July 2023 in Albums
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illereye / Eyeless Records – 28th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Lee Riley’s works include only minimal information about their inspiration or methodology, often coming only with the advice of ‘loudspeakers or headphones’. This is sound advice – if you’ll pardon the pun – not least of all because try as I might, I have never yet succeeded in listening to anything telepathically. This no doubt sounds incredibly facetious, but I’m only partly joking. With my inbox bursting with more new music than I could ever listen to in ten lifetimes, and that’s assuming a lifetime is a couple of centuries, I often find myself lamenting my inability to simply absorb all of the music by some kind of cerebral osmosis. I have sat and visualised a method whereby I place electrodes to my temples and the files simply transfer, or even a large syringe by which the music could be injected into me. I have similar visualisations about writing. Speech to text dictation programmes simply aren’t enough, it’s not practical for the most part. Since I compose most of what I write in my mind while walking along or doing other things, what I need is thought to text, by which the ideas simply appear on the screen. Way more useful than the AI shit that’s supposedly taking over.

With no detail to contextualise the title, or the sound contained therein, From Here We are Nowhere leaves us to interpret for ourselves, and before I hit play, I feel a sense of pessimism descend upon me from the inference of the phrase. The future is bleak… we are nowhere… lost, adrift, or worse, the connotations are there of ceasing to exist. Perhaps it’s my habit of having news channels on in the background while I go about my day, while I work my dayjob, while I cook on an evening, on mute but with subtitles, and the last week or two have elicited a sense of impending apocalypse. And I ask myself, why has it taken till now, when half the world is either melting or on fire to take climate change seriously. So where do we go from here? Probably nowhere.

The six pieces on this album take the form of dense, suffocating drones: the title track thrums and throbs like a thick, acrid smoke that engulfs your entire being, five-and-a-half minutes of muffled tones that grow in tension. Shards start to scrape and funnel near the end, but then it’s gone, just beyond reach. There is something illusive about this album. It feels as though there are forms to be found, but they’re submerged. ‘Lifting Undertow’ is ominous, and the scrunching scrapes and rattles are menacing, reminiscent of a sensation I experienced in a recurring dream as a child, perhaps most easily described as the visual disturbance of a migraine manifesting in an aural form. It’s all very quiet and low-key, making you feel quite detached from the plane on which the sound is playing out, and this is true of the album as a whole. ‘Undoing These Knotted Times’ is a long, low, sonorous undulating buzz that’s sedative and soporific, but also uncomfortable and queasy, as bleary and blurry as the cover art suggests. As that final note hovers and fades, a desolation grips harder: is there really any scope to undo these knotted times? Or is this simply a painful paradox?

The idea of ‘Staring Through Lit Skies’ feels optimistic, evoking perhaps a sunrise, but the reality is that the serrated drone and scrapes of feedback are more like looking at the searing sun through the smoke of a wildfire. It’s painful, and damaging, and it saps your strength as the only dawning is the realisation that we are all doomed.

I feel in my limbs and in my lungs and in my heart as the final trails of ‘No One Knows What’s Inside’ dissipate into the thick, claggy atmosphere following a crackling hum of distortion and grumbling, and then, there is nothing. And here we are, as we find ourselves… nowhere.

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Watch: ‘Bleachburn’ by Nebulae Complex

Posted: 25 July 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Solo experimental electro-industrial outfit, Nebulae Complex has just unveiled their new EP, Bryozoan Operator.

Inspired by peculiar plant and deep sea life amongst other themes, Bryozoan Operator paints an almost alien, yet familiar planetary landscape as viewed through remote sensing instrumentation. While Bryozoan Operator is not a concept EP, each track tells both its own story and also belongs in a loosely-tied and loosely-defined aesthetic universe of the entire EP.

The EP opens a new musical era for Nebulae Complex. It signifies a shift to harder-hitting electro-industrial beats with layered vocals while continuing with an intricate sound design. The sound and music morph organically and sometimes unexpectedly, albeit with solid precision and intention.

As a taster, they’ve produced a video for the track ‘Bleachburn’. Watch it here:

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Watch: ‘Falling Tooth’, by Hanging Freud

Posted: 26 June 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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It is with great honour that we inform you that Glasgow-based duo HANGING FREUD join hands with the Belgian label Spleen+ (division of Alfa Matrix) for the release of their 7th studio album Worship!

‘Falling Tooth’ is the first song from the album, and evokes the band’s influences ranging from post punk, ethereal, synthgaze, cold wave, ambient pop or yet experimental electronica.

Paula’s vocals are dark, haunting, almost glacial, her enunciation is both plaintive and full of echoing fragile grace. While the cinematic music warps them all in a melancholic ethereal cocoon made of mechanical funeral melodies, icy minimal sequences and suffocating synth atmospheres.

Listen here:

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Watch: ‘Fearmonger’ by Darkplace

Posted: 21 May 2023 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Darkplace is a mysterious new Swedish dark dream pop/post-punk group who created a conceptual debut album inspired by the bleak landscape of the Stockholm suburbs that birthed them.

Centred around an alternative reality – or just the grim present and future? – and entitled About The End Of The World, the album is being unveiled gradually over the coming months via a series of imaginative visuals based on animated digital paintings for each of its eleven tracks.

Having recently released ‘Arken över Hesselby’ (The Ark Over Hesselby), the video for which presented the outskirts of a city haunted by an unknown aerial presence, the clip for brand new single ’Fearmonger’ takes us into the heart of that city, presenting an apocalyptic scenario as ominous sirens wail and a lone soldier flees the prying ‘eye in the sky’ of an airship.

The Swedish national alarm system is still tested on a quarterly basis by the army. A familiar sound to all Swedes, the sound of the siren has the nickname ‘Hesa Fredrik’. Darkplace state: “After trying to improve Hesa Fredrik, the government learned that the new horns scared the shit out of people.”

Although rooted in late 80s/early 90s indie styles, Darkplace incorporate a variety of other genres into their sound. However, for the members of this highly secretive group, it is not just about the music. They perceive themselves as more an art project that happens to be exploring and commenting on the state of the world through their chosen mediums of music and video.

Most of the short instrumental pieces on the forthcoming album were written with specific storyboards in mind, with the band revealing that “we started creating the art before we had the music for both singles to date, so the tracks were written as soundtracks to the animation.”

The art itself is a multi-layered process that involves photography, sculpting, oil painting, digital editing and animation. Using apps like Nomad Sculpt to create it before exporting scene specific angles and imported into Procreate to be painted, they add: “we use oil paintbrushes and paint over the photo. It is layers upon layers and it gets messy. Exporting gets even messier since we want depth in the scenes and need to export them in layered depths. A few scenes in this project have been animated frame by frame and it has taken almost two years to complete.”

Watch ‘Fearmonger’ here:

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Bedsit – Dead Bands

Posted: 28 January 2023 in Singles and EPs
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26th January 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The Hull scene has been simmering nicely for some time, and it’s a great advertisement for deprivation and off-the-track locations being melting posts for dark underground creativity.

We may have bid farewell to Chambers and Cannibal Animal, but Hull continues to throw up a wealth of dark and noisy bands, and while Low Hummer have been making some serious headway, along with BDRMM, there’s no shortage of acts emerging behind them, with Besdit making rapid progress recently.

The name is a fair summary. Anyone who as ever endured bedsit living will relate to the claustrophobic sensation of confined living. Bedsits -appropriately – carry connotations of meagreness, of low-budget gloom, and Bedsit really do convey that sense of claustrophobia.

The four-piece’s latest offering, ‘Dead Bands’, is the lead and title track from their upcoming EP, which follows up on 2020’s Pocket Toy EP. It’s a step up from the lo-fi grunge metal production of its predecessor, and sees the band consolidated on that blueprint, leaping from rough diamonds ready for development to something lean and mean, and dense and taut and truly outstanding.

It’s not just the production: the composition, the playing, the vocals, the lot – they’ve not sold out and gone super-slick by any means, but ‘Dead Bands’ is a dark, dense amalgamation of post-punk and grunge, and while it may be a celebration of bands gone before, it sounds pretty bleak in its mid-tempo, bass-driven way, paired with baritone vocals that border on the gothic. It’s a combination of the sound of 1985 and the sound of 1993 and it’s dark and its heavy, but it’s magnificently realised with some killer riffage and some blistering, blustery guitars squall and scream their way to the end.

There’s no joy to be found here, but it’s a glorious exercise in dark nihilism that has to be my single of the year so far.

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Houses of Worship – Migration OST

Posted: 13 December 2022 in Albums
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Midira Records – 25th November 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

This album is, as the title suggests, a soundtrack work. Although released under the moniker Houses of Worship, it’s essentially the second album by Thisquietarmy x Hellenica.

The summer of 2020 saw Eric Quach (thisquietarmy) and Jim Demos (Hellenica) come together to record a collaborative album, which emerged as Houses of Worship, described as ‘an epic work of experimental industrial ambient, is an ode to dying buildings and the unwelcome gentrification of neighborhoods’.

This, the follow-up, came about after they ‘played their first concerts in the streets of Montreal from inside of a cube truck. These performances were filmed and recorded to produce "TQAXHLNKA: MIGRATION,” a twenty-two-minute experimental art documentary and an accompanying soundtrack. The film simulated the cautionary tale of what the Montreal arts and music scene could look like in a post-pandemic world. As the title suggests, it reflects the highly concerning exodus of artists constantly being divided and pushed out further from their community.’

At twenty-two minutes in duration, it’s a minute short of the magic spot, but this is a magnificently atmospheric work that goes beyond dark ambience and ventures into the vastly cinematic, space-drifting expansiveness that transports the listener beyond the terrestrial domain.

The album contains more audio than the film’s running time, and drags the listener through a bleak journey which articulates via the medium of sound the themes and scenes which preoccupy the duo, who explain, ‘With the current struggles linked to the pandemic restrictions, we have seen the acceleration of the gentrification process in neighborhoods where the heart of these activities takes place. As a result, a multitude of venues, studios and artistic spaces – places used for exchanging ideas with our peers and building communities meant to inspire and nurture our souls had to shut down.’

The tone is dark, the textures industrial, yet tinged with echo-heavy melancholy, a combination of anger, emptiness, and sadness. The soaring drones inspire a certain elevation, while the gritty grind is the sound of construction, regeneration. Gentrification is the face of capitalism eating itself; having run out of new ideas, it’s simply fallen into a cycle of recreation and rehashing. Upscaling, upwhatevering, it’s all about selling the new version of the same od shit at a higher price to the same saturated market. When will enough ever be enough?

Meanwhile, capitalism follows the former tropes of the avant-garde, destroying to rebuild, and Migration is the soundtrack to that.

There are lots of drones, lots of dolorous tones, lots of scraping, sinewy mid-range and gravel-grabbing, churning lower spectrum sounds, as well a haunting piano and infinite empty space. The titles paint the picture in themselves, and it’s dark, smoggy, sulphurous. ‘Total Waste Management’; ‘Polytethylene Terephthalate’; ‘Oil Terminal Tank Farm’ are all evocative of stark industrial scenes.

‘Industrial Estate Bird’s-Eye’ is a haunting wail, presumably of a theremin – over a low, throbbing drone that’s reminiscent of Suicide, and elsewhere, the duo conjure thick, billowing clouds of doom that sound like Sunn O))) behind a power station, as dense rumbles ripple forth. The twelve-and-a-half-minute finale, ‘Throbbing Magnetics’ fulfils the promise of its title, a bucking beast of claustrophobic, crushing gloom, and you feel yourself dragged into the sludge of that relentless, interminable cycle of collapse and construct.

It’s an accomplished work, but a depressing one, and listening places to the fore the abject nature of late capitalism, and the fact that any attempt to save the planet is futile in the face of the onslaught of bulldozers. Redevelopment has nothing to do with environment, only profit, and hard as you might rebel, as strongly as you may protest, you’re powerless against the big money. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s the sad truth. Houses of Worship recognise this. They may hope for better, but Migration is not a protest record, but the sound of grim acceptance.

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Shrine Of Reflection – Child of the World

Posted: 10 December 2022 in Singles and EPs
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25th November 2022

James Wells

Time marches on, and here we are almost midway through December still catching up with November releases, this time with Polish ‘dark rock’ duo Shrine Of Reflection.

There’s a great temptation to split hairs and that argue that surely the dark rock tag is goths pretending not to be goth, but that would be unjust, as this six-and-a-half-minute sonic adventure is more post-rock than anything, but there are also hints of prog and bleak neofolk vibes emanating from the murky tones, where a sparse, spindly lead line drifts over a slow, deliberate thunder-like beat that plods away like a heavy heart, before it blossoms into colour at the midpoint into an expansive, cinematic sweep.

The blurbage summarises that “‘Child Of The World’ is a song inspired by the movie, Interstellar. It’s about the misery of a human being who is trapped on planet Earth and who is unable to discover the truth of the universe’s nature despite the fact of being its child. All this person can do is just simply stare at the sky and dream.”

That sense of entrapment is relatable, but more than this, the vocals become increasingly cracked and desperate as the song progresses, before the slow-building crescendo takes over, finally tapering off into muffled samples that leave you looking into the emptiness, and wondering.

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