The album opens with the Saddest Smile whose minimal guitar is overlaid with a lamentational vocal. It is a pensive, introspective exploration of disenchantment, isolation, and the self-hatred projected on others that sets the tone for the rest of the record. A Very Good Life proceeds with a crunchy snare, and plodding bass that leads into Larissa Iceglass's melancholic vocal style, already evolved in both production and range highlighted by a haunting echo, and spectral effects, lyrically continuing the theme of loathing and projection explored in the previous track. The word Albatross is often used as a metaphor for a curse-like psychological burden. It is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Here in a song ... read more