Origami Angel guide us track by track through their new album ‘Feeling Not Found’, out now via Counter Intuitive Records.
LOST SIGNAL
“This is the last song we wrote for the record; we had originally tracked it without it. It was a demo that I had written that came from the darkest place on the album. It’s also a slight fourth wall-breaking immersion from where the rest of the songs come from, giving it this overture feel.
This is long-winded, but it is important. I had a cousin who was so important to me. He played in a load of DIY punk bands in Philly in the 2000s that never broke through but were important to the landscape of the future of music. He was such a champion for everyone Unfortunately, in January of 2023, he passed away. And I don’t think that anybody from his immediate family knew that he had made so many people in this music community feel great. What happened at his funeral service was 300 people showed up for a room that was supposed to hold 50 people max.
So, the deacon was giving a speech, and they had a Bluetooth speaker so that everyone could hear what he was saying. And whilst he was giving this speech about walking with God, which my cousin would have hated, all you could hear was the static fucking up the Bluetooth. You couldn’t hear a damn word he was saying where in this incredibly dark moment, so many people were laughing at the absurdity. That ends, and the deacon hands the mic over to my other cousin, and then everything is clear as a bell as he gives one of the most beautiful and heartfelt speeches I’ve ever heard. It felt like I was witnessing one of the most spiritual moments whilst rejecting the form of spirituality which that room represented.
That idea of static it’s such an awful sound, but it is a remnant from the Big Bang. It’s evidence of our creation and represented so much in this spiritual moment that I had had. The song is so different from everything else on the record, but it felt necessary because it represents the bigger picture. It’s like looking at a huge map, to then zoom in to view one particular story. It’s like a fourth dimension of time away from our linear view of the passage of time. This is the song that is most personal to me, whilst also feeling like the most out of time of the record, which feels really interesting.”
DIRTY MIRROR SELFIE
“I felt we could do something really cool with this song, having this dissonant riff matched with this joyous chorus following a set of yearning verses. There’s a lot of tension in there, which came out once we got in and started working with Will Yip at Studio 4. I feel like we have done the easy core thing in the past, but we have never done it quite like how we have here. It waves into these parts rather than just being major key. It goes from this solid and dark thing into this atmospheric verse to this grounded, tension-filled pre-chorus; it felt like we had the whole identity of this album in this one song.
Lyrically, a theme for me was that I felt a lot of pressure writing music after ‘Somewhere City’ because of how much it means to people. That’s the coolest thing. It’s overwhelmingly positive the entire time, this place that you can go to when you need it. But I started to view myself as the person who always has all those answers. I think something that was huge for me was to break out of that and start with ambiguity. I feel good about my life but I’m not always that voice. To relieve this pressure and say to myself that I can’t always be 20 and stoked on it, especially after all this bad shit has happened.”
WHERE BLUE LIGHT BLOOMS
“Musically, this has even more of that tension. The most tension on the record. This gritty darkness. But there is still some hope in these chords. But it turned from being a crazy positive song into something that represents that sense of ambiguity even more so. It came from me viewing lockdown and this pause in our band following all the pressure that I felt and trying to temper my expectations of what this could be. In lockdown, all that pressure was gone, and I was not expected to do anything. I loved it so much, but it also allowed me to realise just how dark a place I was in. It lives in this spot of knowing I’m fucked up about how I’m feeling, but I really don’t want the alternative right now. See the light at the end of the tunnel of what lockdown was and knowing I will have to lock in on making music again in a situation where the band has grown.”
VIRAL
“This is the first part of the record where it is looking at oneself and saying, ‘I’m fucked’. The title ‘Viral’ is almost a triple entendre with what was happening. First, you have this virus that is COVID. Then you have this idea of viewing yourself as a computer, where you have a virus within the mind, that of being perceived and not knowing how to deal with it. Thirdly, it goes to the idea of becoming viral on the Internet. It’s looking at this insurmountable pressure and wondering how anyone could deal with it, let alone me. I’m a part of a system that has broken down, and this song is me figuring out just how low you can go.”
UNDERNEATH MY SKIN
“This is starting to talk about how much trouble I was having with that idea of being perceived. It came from this musical perception and how everything changes when you start to achieve and get some stuff. But those first stages of change are really weird. People know my name and are talking about the things that I do, even outside of the art. The way I talk or my nickname or stuff like that. I don’t think the human brain has evolved enough to think that more than 50 people can perceive you simultaneously. I have no science to back it up, but I believe it! Perception just freaks me out, even when it isn’t bad shit. It all just makes me feel crazy.”
WRETCHED TRAJECTORY
“This is more of a personal angle on that perception, saying, ‘This sucks, get me the hell out of here’. It’s a reminder that there are escapes from it. Our music has been the escape, but there’s other music. There are video games. But even more so, it’s about wanting to be around friends and family, the people that make me feel safe. That is the space that still exists within all of this. It is sometimes hard to think about those things when you tour 200 days a year or off tour; you’re still grinding to ensure everything is working. But you just have to remember that there is something outside of this for you. That can be the thing that saves you. It feels very easycore in nature.”
AP REVISIONIST HISTORY
“This song is more about the toxicity the Internet has allowed to thrive. Not to be a boomer, but it happens all the time when I see things being blown up to proportions that are unfathomable. It’s about rebelling against that. It can be viewed as cancel culture stuff, which is untrue. I’m not trying to make a statement like that. It’s very easy to depersonalise someone. The place I see it the most is on the highway. People see a certain car and go, ‘Fuck that, I hate that car’. There’s a person in there, maybe a family.
When there’s no consequence to your action or view, where physical or metaphorical walls guard you, it’s easy to feel that way. It happens all the time on the web, where people will just go and go. I know why it happens because there is so much pent-up rage around right now. We resort to this infighting because we can’t actually speak to the things that we are mad at.”
LIVING PROOF
“To me, this is a hater song. It’s a diss track towards this particular kind of person. I feel like I’m also talking to an older version of myself. I’m talking to a nuisance, someone who will do crazy shit and push boundaries. Some people will do wrong things and then jump to, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out like that’. But this pattern of destruction and forgiveness and destruction again, maybe it shows that you’re not actually sorry. I think it’s the most negative song on the record because of that. It’s the most spiteful I felt.”
FRUIT WINE
“This song is about being frustrated with myself, but in a playful way. I look at it as a really funny look at my character traits, where I know I have made something so much harder for myself. It sometimes feels like I have to perform a miracle to do something that is so regular. Whether it’s about getting over the pressure I’ve already mentioned or just being organised, it can go in a lot of different directions.
I don’t drink, I’m straight edge, so I don’t know anything about wine. But my mom says that fruit wine is typically not the nicest. The way I had envisioned it was that water into wine is much more elegant, whilst the idea of it being into fruit wine made it feel that bit more regular to me. I’m not performing miracles to make something awesome. I’m performing a miracle by just making coffee. Talking about it now, maybe it is a bit about the battle of depression.”
SIXTH CENTS (GET IT?)
“The more time I have spent reflecting on this record, the more it feels like it is the most Origami Angel thing we have done. It doesn’t know what it wants to be at any given moment, but not in a bad way. I think this song, in particular, is about the industry and not wanting to conform; it’s important for us to be going from here to there. You think you know this is going, and you think you can turn this into a machine rather than art but listen because this is about to be the weirdest song on this record. I love that so much.”
SECONDGRADFOOFIGHT
“This song stems from the over-stimulus of what content has become. I have so much information on everything. Everything that used to have mystique. I’m thinking about how, personally, I feel threatened by. I’m losing a lot of charm because of it. I don’t want to see as much as I’m seeing. So, I went off social media. I didn’t tweet shit apart from about Origami Angel being on tour. My personal Instagram has a gap from 2019 to 2023. I told myself that I was going to go off the grid, and that’s exactly what I did.”
HM07 WATERFALL
“The name of this song came about because it says the word ‘Waterfall’ one time in the chorus. The idea is that the title track is the end credits of this record, whilst ‘Higher Road’ just before it is the road to getting there. I view it as the victory road in Pokémon, and you need HM 07, Waterfall’ to get there.
So, it’s about the journey within that. It’s about reflecting on all these other shit within the record, feeling so different and isolated from everyone else. You are then pondering why I feel this way and realising that all these other things are starting to make me resent the things I love in my life. Then there’s the realisation of how quickly things can change and adjust to that. Knowing that your relationship with things that you used to love and feel strongly about can change.”
HIGHER ROAD
“The path of this song is about feeling everything that you have before as this voice against you. I feel like I’m a vulnerable person within this, where I feel like I have been taken advantage of because I was always worried about being the nice guy. I would see myself as a people pleaser, I would take on too many things. That inevitably led to some huge downfalls in my life where I felt truly screwed over. And it has to do with everything that has been in these 12 songs that have come before.
To look that in the face and take it because all of that will continue to happen. But what Origami Angel is starts right here. What me and Pat are doing is in a renaissance and it is back right here and right now. If someone has been listening to our band for a long time, I feel this could be one of their favourites. It harkens back to a lot of different eras whilst still feeling new.”
FEELING NOT FOUND
“This is where it really starts rather than ends. If we go back to ‘Lost Signal’, we are zooming in on this universe. Now we are zooming back out, but instead of returning to this omnipresent narrator in this song, it is instead seeing things from the same person who took us through tracks two to thirteen.
Something I wanted to get across with this song was that this record is about being nostalgic for a time before everything was fucked up and wrong. This mental health crisis, because that’s what it was for me. But it is also realising that with every other mental health crisis I have had in my life, I was doing the exact same shit and feeling nostalgia for how great things were before that again and again. I’ve always wanted to feel new and in writing the lyrics here, I realised that there is none of that. I’m stuck in a loop that I’m trying to break free of to try and feel new, but how can I do anything when I’m just thinking about things that aren’t happening right now?
Maybe everything has always been kind of fucked up, and the song becomes the most hopeful because of that. Things might never have been that bright in the first place, and any brightness and light that there has been because we have created it together. A community of people coming out to see us and singing these songs with us. That’s what this journey has been all about.”
