featured image shot by Luke Ivanovich

Track Dissection aims to capture the essence of an artist’s song: the effort behind it, the context surrounding it, and the emotions etched within it. In each piece, the artist pulls back the curtain of their work, revealing its intimacies.

---

The verse/chorus riffs in the first part of the song we wrote in early 2023, and it’s an extremely simple, slowcore-type of line, which reflects where the band was at in terms of influence around that time. We liked how minimal it sounded, and so the instrumentation around that line with the drums and bass is also incredibly minimal, marching along without a clear end point. Jeremy’s lead line is understated and thoughtful. We kept changing the second half of the song because it was never quite hitting the way we wanted it to. We knew we wanted it to go somewhere chaotic and noisy because of the nature of the lyrics, but didn’t really know how to get it to that point without it sounding forced or too emo. Eventually, just by running through it in the practice space for a while, we came up with this idea to transition it to that point with these group hits and hard stops, with vocals in between that become increasingly more manic/panicked. It’s almost like a musical progression of our own influences in one song, because of how many iterations there were and how our tastes changed over the course of writing it; which, I think, is cool. In the studio we just kept adding guitar tracks and crazy distorted synthesizers at the end to really just hammer home the idea that everything is falling apart. 

Lyrics

The lyrics in the first part of the song came pretty quickly to me, mostly just by referencing conversations I’ve had in the past and focusing on images I remember from those conversations and trying to describe that in a tangible way. (In) the second half, I was really trying to create a character, like the worst version of myself, where ego and fragility just completely take over your psyche and block out everything else. 

There’s a performance of a really early version of this song somewhere on Youtube. The whole second half is completely different, but the first half is largely the same exact thing, which I think is really cool. There’s also a very secret recording of it we did in a studio in Denver in the summer of 2023 that has yet another different ending that we played live maybe once. I’m not sure if that will ever see the light of day, maybe on a deluxe version of the album one day. 

As a whole, the track is about someone justifying their poor actions that resulted in the end of a relationship. The cycle of needing to push blame onto someone else leaves the narrator consumed by their insecurities. At the beginning, it’s much softer but the seeds are there with lines like, “You shouldn’t have asked me what I want.” This results in a manic, ego-driven spiral at the end with the line, “How can you smile when god is my audience?” which is overtly dramatic and ridiculous, but also a good representation to me of a manic state. That’s pretty much the idea.

---