When Dimitri Giannopoulos was a teenager, he thought he might be living in a dream. Alienated, anxious, and unsettled, he tried his hardest to process a world that he felt disconnected from. “I refused to believe anything I was seeing was happening to me or even happening at all,” he told in 2016.
“I was just freaked out by everything.” He says that he’s since outgrown his existential angst, but similar feelings have clearly found a home in the slow-moving gloom of the songs he makes in . The forms of those songs have shifted occasionally over the years—from hushed, stripped-down recordings that recall ’s sky-gazing folk songs to distressed lo-fi experiments in the mold of ’s desperate slowcore to —but they’re all united by Giannopoulos’ oblique approach to songwriting.
His lyrics are vivid but fragmented and opaque; he frequently sounds like someone describing a dream as their eyes slowly open. On the band’s new album , Giannopoulos often does just that. He recalls or references dreams in four separate songs, and throughout the record, his writing is similarly disorienting and enigmatic.
On opener “Snow Angel,” he sings of funerals and drownings, of looming evil and a desire to be alone. Elsewhere he meditates on emptiness, witnesses bloodbaths, and remembers, through a haze, an argument that went too far. It’s hard to piece together concrete narratives, but his cryptic koans and foggy memories have a strangely affecting power.
For all the uncer.