fishmonger

The opening of this track feels like stepping into a room where something has already gone wrong and no one is acknowledging it yet. underscores layers compressed, almost clipping guitars over a drum machine that swings between emo directness and hyperpop hyperactivity, and the tension between those two modes is exactly the point — the song can't decide whether to implode or explode, so it does both simultaneously in different registers. The vocal delivery is raw in the way of someone who's been crying for so long they've passed through emotion into something flatter and stranger, almost conversational in the way it drops syllables and rushes through phrases. Lyrically, the song circles the experience of self-erasure through service, of pouring yourself into someone or something and finding that there's less of you afterward than there was before. The "fishmonger" image operates as a kind of bleak metaphor for emotional labor: cutting yourself apart and selling the pieces. As the title track of underscores' 2022 breakthrough album, it established the emotional grammar of the whole project — a generation raised on both emo's confessional rawness and PC Music's production maximalism, finding in that collision a way to say things that neither genre could hold alone. It belongs in headphones on a long commute when you need to feel seen in a way that doesn't ask anything of you.