Whiskey & Sleeping Pills

Thom Wasluck builds this track the way someone builds a wall — brick by brick, each layer of distorted guitar added not to beautify but to seal something in. The production is deliberately lo-fi, cassette-warped and degraded, as if the song has been physically weathered by the experiences it describes. The title tells you everything about the emotional subject matter — this is a portrait of anesthetic living, of using substances not to feel good but to feel less, and the music embodies that logic faithfully. Drums hit with a dull, muffled thud, like heartbeats heard through a wall of cotton. The guitars don't shimmer or soar; they grind and sustain, hovering in a middle register that feels neither warm nor cold, just present and inescapable. Wasluck's vocals are smeared across the surface of the mix, almost indistinguishable from the instrumental texture, which is the point — the self is dissolving, becoming indistinct from the noise surrounding it. The song doesn't dramatize crisis; it inhabits the grey flatness that precedes and follows it. There's a strange comfort in how thoroughly it refuses catharsis, how it just sits with its subject without resolving anything. Planning for Burial emerged from the American underground shoegaze/drone scene of the early 2010s, a tradition of solo home-recording projects that treated emotional devastation as primary material. This is music for the hours between 3 and 5 AM, when the specific quality of your own despair starts to feel almost peaceful.