Trying

"Trying" closes SG Lewis's thematic cycle with the one word that resists both arrival and defeat — the ongoing participial, the continuous present of effort without guaranteed outcome. The production captures this tense exactly: a groove that maintains momentum without resolving, harmonic movement that circles through familiar territory without finding a comfortable resting place, synthesizer textures that remain in motion. The arrangement has a quality of genuine exertion — not the glamorized effort of triumph narratives but the quieter, less photogenic labor of continuing when continuation is neither certain nor obviously rewarded. The vocal performance is probably the most emotionally unguarded in his catalog: the voice doesn't aestheticize the difficulty, doesn't make it beautiful by making it palatable, but delivers the lyric with the slightly ragged quality of someone in the middle of something rather than reflecting on it from safety. Culturally, "Trying" operates in conversation with a British tradition of honest plainspokenness about difficult feeling — the directness of The Smiths, the confessional precision of early Bon Iver, the refusal to make suffering scenic — while remaining firmly inside dance music's conviction that rhythm is a form of perseverance. It belongs to all the long middles that don't make it into the story people tell afterward about how they got through something, the unremarkable Tuesday evenings when you kept going for no dramatic reason, simply because stopping seemed worse.