It's Happening Again

From her more experimental Citizen of Glass period, this song is Obel at her most architecturally bold — a composition built around repetition not as monotony but as accumulation, the way certain patterns in a life reveal themselves only through their recurrence. The production is deliberately fractured: piano loops that phase against each other, strings that enter and exit with clinical precision, electronic elements woven through the acoustic fabric in ways that blur the boundary between natural and processed. Her voice is deployed almost as another instrument here, the melody functional rather than expressive, the emotional content emerging from the structure rather than the vocal performance. The title's mixture of resignation and disbelief captures something precise about pattern recognition: the specific feeling of watching something you've been through before arrive again, the knowledge that you are not outside the system you're observing. Emotionally, this is the territory of compulsion, repetition, the psychological recurrence that characterizes unresolved experience. The Citizen of Glass album was explicitly about transparency and the glass walls between private self and public life, and this song extends that metaphor into time — seeing through to the next iteration of the same event. It is an intellectual and emotional challenge, rewarding sustained attention.