Forty years, chucked out there without much ceremony. Forty years to work out that the whole story from when he was a kid… you’re not good enough, get in line… was a con dressed up as advice. Shorty wanted the piano as a boy. Got the schools someone else picked instead, an office job, seven years stuck inside it like a jacket two sizes too tight that you don’t take off because taking it off scares you more than keeping it on.
Music sat underneath the whole time, quiet, patient as a debt racking up interest. home is him finally paying it back.
wake up opens on a single name, Lenka, and it takes a second to work out who she is, the one who catches him performing instead of being real, but before the words even land you’re already inside that muffled, cavernous swell you’d swear you’d heard off a Sigur Rós record, all reverb and distance. ready when you are shifts sideways into something colder and more angular, there's a whiff of 80s new wave in there somewhere, though don't quote me, guitars pulled back just enough to ache rather than shine, losing you in the woods just far enough to take yourself apart and put the pieces back with more care.
Then birds were telling us all the time grabs you by the gut, a hollow threatening to swallow you whole like some dying star. liberation pulls the reverse trick: point the finger and your own face is what stares back.
old is the one carrying the record on its back, the lead single, and it earns that spot without straining for it. Bitter, circling, refusing to resolve itself, bass and guitar locked into a geometric back and forth that never quite lets you settle. There’s a bit of Interpol in the coldness of it, but pull in closer and it’s really the intimate side of Tool, the parts where the riff isn’t showing off, just grinding away underneath. Something hardens. Slow, the way rust works, not the way a punch works. A stone round the heart before you even clock it.
love smells like Radiohead, no way around it, that same paranoid hush, questions fired at you with nowhere to hide from them, a weak sheep among wolves that never sleep. wellmess comes in smaller and rawer, a daft title that somehow earns itself, shame leaking out in sobs while friends nearby look the other way.
Then you better run slams the door on the way out. This is where the old prog background he’s been carrying since Millhouse finally shows its teeth again, sharp guitar work dragged through something colder and industrial, Nine Inch Nails territory with a bit of The Cure‘s gloom bleeding round the edges. Forgiveness gets a mention too, instead of nailing every enemy up one by one. Truth and love, he keeps saying, like it's the simplest thing in the world and also the hardest.
Lenka’s in there somewhere behind most of it, the one he keeps circling back to. Or maybe that’s just what you tell yourself, forty years in, when you finally stop running long enough to look.