Cosmic Thrill Seekers

Kory Gregory approaches a concept album about the end of the world and the inside of a depressed mind with a kind of sprawling ambition that shouldn't work but absolutely does. The title track functions as both overture and thesis statement for the record — a lo-fi production aesthetic that makes the sound feel immediate and slightly fragile, like it was recorded in one uninterrupted take by people who knew they had to get it right because they couldn't afford another try. The guitar tones are raw, slightly distorted, possessing that quality of being just barely controlled. Gregory's voice is one of the more distinctive in contemporary emo: nasal and earnest, completely stripped of any affectation, delivering lines that might read as melodramatic on paper but land as simply true in the context of his delivery. The song reaches for the cosmic — genuinely tries to place personal devastation against the scale of the universe — and the distance between those two registers is where its emotional power lives. It's a young person discovering that nihilism and caring about things can coexist, that the smallness of human life doesn't make human suffering smaller. This is the soundtrack for lying on your back somewhere and staring at a sky dark enough to see actual stars, feeling simultaneously meaningless and painfully alive.