Trying

midwxst builds this track around a central emotional contradiction — the exhaustion of effort and the refusal to stop making it — and the production reflects that tension in how it layers softness against something harder underneath. Acoustic and electronic elements coexist uneasily, neither fully dominant, the beat clipping gently against melodic passages that feel genuinely tender. His voice has a confessional quality that doesn't strain for effect; he sounds like he's talking to someone specific, and that specificity is what distinguishes his work from more generic emo-rap. The phrasing is conversational, sentences ending where sentences end rather than where rhyme schemes demand, which makes the lyrics feel discovered rather than constructed. The emotional landscape is one most people recognize — the period when you're actively working on something (a relationship, yourself, a future) and still not sure it's landing, still not sure the work is being seen or received. Indiana's midwestern underground contributed a particular flavor of sincerity to the hyperpop-adjacent space he occupies, less ironic than coastal contemporaries, more willing to sit with earnestness without armor. This is music for the late-night drive home after a difficult conversation that might have gone somewhere, or might not have — the ambiguity still unresolved, the trying still ongoing.