Music Reviews

It finally clicked.

4 months. That’s how long I was trying to get into this album, but for some reason just couldn’t. I was going crazy – everyone around me was calling this the easy album of the year and I was just sitting over here not understanding the hype at all. But today that changed – I finally just sat down and listened to it, no pre-judgements, just turn all my attention to the music and it’s meaning – and it was at the 5th track „Ground Zero“ where this record just suddenly made complete sense. You see, this album doesn’t make NO sense whatsoever, BUT THAT’S WHY IT WORKS. This album really makes you question what even music is. It doesn’t try to follow any musical formulas, it doesn’t follow basically any genre restrictions, it just does what it wants and that is to musically express grief – grief is the main focus of this record and the hardships and struggles that come with loosing someone really close to you. The feeling of how the world just keeps spinning even though you still haven’t dealt with your loss – all of that becomes apparent on track seven, „Top Picks For You“, AKA the first, and probably also the last, glitch hop song to ever make me break down into tears. Once you get to this point in the album there is no turning back, everything just clicks, but it’s not an easy journey to get there – the opposite in fact. The world that the album creates through it’s music is dark, glitched, fundamentally broken and just incredibly tough to swallow. There is constantly this paranoid feeling that something is a little off and that feeling haunts you throughout the whole listening expirience. And what an expirience it is, I don’t think any album this year has made me so just… emotionally drenched. Now I personally never lost anyone that I was super emotionally tied to, so for me, I can’t even IMAGINE how horiffying of an expirience that must be, but if it’s even half as bad as this album’s sound is portraying it to be, then good god. It’s hard to talk about each individual track here, because the expirience works as a whole and taking individual tracks out just isn’t how this album is supposed to be listened to – it’s a journey through the grieving mind, a painful f***ed-up journey, that ends on a somewhat of a hopeful note, in the form of the song „Bye Strom“. This song says to the listener to keep their head up, that even though that someone else’s journey came to an end, doesn’t mean your own does too, even if that person was super imporant to you – „the show must go on“. And even though it may take weeks, months or hell even years, eventually, you will move on. It doesn’t try to downplay the grieving process, it let’s you very well know that it will be incredibly difficult and painful – but not impossible.

Now I got a little too introspective there, but it’s crucial to undestand all of this in order to truly appriciate how powerful this record really is. The music’s dark, it’s distorted, it doesn’t make no sense in some places, but it’s clear that it’s all calculated and intentional, I haven’t heard a depiction of grief this accurate since I think „A Crow Looked At Me“. Some key tracks would be the opener „Outside“, which is an ambitious opener that really lets the listener know, that what you’re about to hear is nothing short of insane, both singles „Knees“ and „Superman That“, the first of the two being one of the more accessible tracks on the album, while the latter being funnily enough one of the least accessible ones and also the track „Footwork in a Forest Fire“ which is honestly kind of beyond words, it’s one of those things where you gotta expirience it to truly understand it – that also kinda goes for this whole album to be honest.

… s**t. I mean this album broke me. I can’t even put into words what this music does to you, but it’s really something to behold… Anyways yeah, I see the hype now lol (also I realise this probably should have been a disclaimer at the start of the review, but I usually like to keep the swears out of my reviews, but with this one I felt like it really helped to express how truly just f***ed this album is).

10/10