Mykl Barton guides us through every vulnerable ebb and crushing flow of Sickjoy’s new album, from beginning to end.
Back At The Beginning
This is a tiny piece of joy in its purest, calmest form. The record is I guess a chronicling of the last few years of my life. The darkest and most challenging I’ve ever had. It felt right to open the book with something soft, if anything, just to prove to myself it existed.
All Damage
It’s admitting rather than accepting the things that have gone on through my life that lead me to some hard spots. I’d fallen into a pretty low place and felt accepted by the things that met me there. The things I chose to do. I’ve been filling a lot of holes in myself for a long time. It felt like the love I needed.
Nothing Good
The things that can shape someone. The things that have shaped me. Opening a door I’ve had closed for most of my life. Trying to exorcise the pain of not only the memory but everything that was lost and distorted in its wake. With a little sliver of spite that I’m changed and I have been twisted, but I’m still here, and with that, something new can happen.
Anything Goes
This was the first song written after getting sober. About a month or so clean. I was looking back, still as that other person. Knowing I need to change, but it felt something written deep in me, didn’t want to. Still. It’s a recount from realising I’m in hell and wondering why I’m trying to keep myself there.
Cinnamon Burn
Losing someone you love. I’m not going to go into it anymore than what’s already written in the lyrics. It’s difficult to share something with someone that can make you feel like so high, whilst at the same time it kills you both more and more in different ways. It’s a love song for the broken-hearted that just don’t know when to quit.
Gone Missing
Buried deep down in the absence of feeling fucking anything. Who you are has gone away. We had a beautiful moment come out of this during recording. Al was playing a guitar part, and the playback dropped out. He kept playing, and we just sat there and listened to him play blind to a drum track. He stopped exactly where the song ended without knowing. We opened it back up, and it fit so beautifully. We were all, including Al, weirded out a bit. That one, first take, is what stayed.
Here We Are, Somewhere Liminal
This was recorded at the first session of writing the album. We’d holed up for a week in the attic of First Avenue Studios in Newcastle. The late Dave Curle and Tim kindly gave us permission to live up there. There was a thick atmosphere. Dependence was in the room with us, in various forms. The recording is a snippet from a loop we had going for a while in a trance. When I found it again, it felt like a recording from purgatory.
Stockholm Flavour
This came from a period I was messing around with a lot of synth plug-ins. I was trying to write in a different order, instrumentation-wise, so I couldn’t rely on typical impactful guitar moments. I think lyrically, there’s no hiding what’s going on. Crawling on your belly, doing anything to keep the habit. That’s a vulnerable spot to put yourself in. It’s not a space anything can exist permanently.
Video Game
This was another one written at that weird early period of being sober. I’d had the chorus already but just hadn’t sorted my shit out to finish the song. I didn’t want it to be structured in the way we’d normally done things. It all felt kind of hypnotic or trance-like. Kind of what I was just waking up from. During writing, I’d had a relapse and then tried to get sober again. It felt like a recurring pattern in my life. The lyrics felt like admission and acceptance or resolution at the same time. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I’m not sure. It’s the song on the record I’m probably most proud of.
Strawberries & Cigarettes
It’s a love song. For better or for worse. I’d like to write more in this direction in the future. It felt really refreshing to come to the chorus and go down instead of big distortion and stuff. I’m kind of just trying to rip off Lana Del Ray and Radiohead at the same time and fallen short of both.
Somebody Else
This was an older song that felt relevant to the narrative of the record, so we wanted to include it. It got a little touch-up and kind of built itself once the other songs were there as the lighthouse. I was ready for death, and it kind of drags you along forcibly toward it.
Death Scene (More Forever)
The whole record, the whole life span of the band, my whole life, has been centred or fixated on duality. The dissonance of everything in life has always both bothered me and comforted me. I wanted to keep that attention in the song, not just lyrically but musically. I wanted to write a contradiction because that’s what I felt I was living at the time. There’s something comforting and familiar about ‘suffering’. Whether that’s self-imposed or otherwise. I could picture myself amongst the choir of burnouts in a decrepit church singing the gospel of whatever God we’d each chosen to die for.
