Through Being Cool

There is a scrappiness to this recording that feels deliberate, like the songs were captured mid-argument with the world. The guitars are tightly coiled, the tempo aggressive without tipping into hardcore, and the production carries that late-nineties rawness where you can feel the room around the instruments. Conley's voice here is even more strained than it would become — higher, more desperate, cracking at the seams in ways that sound less like performance and more like actual feeling breaking through. The song builds a kind of social manifesto out of rejection, about abandoning the performance of coolness in favor of the people who already understand you. There is genuine contempt in it, but also warmth — the contempt is directed outward, toward conformity and social posturing, and the warmth is for whoever is standing beside you once the pretense is dropped. It belongs to the small-club, zine-culture late nineties emo world, when emotional honesty felt like a political act. The energy is confrontational in the best sense: it doesn't ask for your approval. You put this on when you've stopped trying to seem a certain way and just want to be where you actually are.