'From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.' - Immanuel Kant

I have no idea how to write about this album. At a time marked by both significant personal turbulence and nauseating political degeneration, it was a thing to keep me sane. The place I buried the hurt - in the thousands of tiny details that I obsessed over every free moment I could spare. Meditation in a raging storm.

The personal strife (which I will not name, for it was not mine alone) has thankfully resolved, almost as the album was finished. I can listen back over it and even hear it objectively now. Listening to the final masters there were so many moments I would highlight - the absolutely stunning performances from the five guest vocalists, the ridiculous number of interlocking layers in Spend the Summer and Yggdrasil, the drop in Halcyon, the howls of rage and despair that make up Ishamael, The Hydra, Bootlicker Nation, Gabriela's Howl and Towers and the gallows humour snuck in between the lines - hundreds of other things and little moments and tricks and meanings I could happily bore you to tears explaining. I won't.

In all honesty, I really have to resist the urge to essay a codex for the album, out of desperation to be understood. I will limit the explanation to say that there is a narrative of sorts linking each track together - in parts autobiographical (particularly the first half of the record) and in parts very much not. My fondest hope is that some people who hear it find it engaging enough to pick apart and work out what it means.

Musically it features: dream pop, electronica, trip-hop, rave, post-rock, post-punk, electro, hip-hop, whispercore (shut up it's a thing now), dub, downtempo, ambient, glitch, a drunken shoegaze singalong, spoken word and more influences that I can possibly describe.

At the moment it is as close as I can get to summing what I feel about life, politics and music into one package. I hope you enjoy it.

- Sunbane