SPOTLIGHT

Touches a real 2009 suicide attempt, sourced entirely to Barrett's own published account of it (see sources). Written factually and without dramatization; worth your own read before this goes anywhere public.

Giles Corey isn't shaped like a document of recovery -- it doesn't resolve. Barrett has written that the record and its accompanying book came directly out of a suicide attempt in the spring of 2009, and out of reading he was doing at the time on Robert Voor, a fringe theorist of death and the afterlife whose ideas run through most of what Barrett has made since. The project's name comes from the Salem farmer pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea, reportedly calling only for "more weight" as it happened -- endurance under literal weight, not innocence, as the whole point. That's the record's logic too: not a way out of the feeling, but a way of staying inside it long enough to describe it accurately. The songs move between hushed, exhausted verses and noise that doesn't resolve into catharsis so much as just stop.

Sadness runs on a specific refusal: don't think about whether it's good. Ojeda has described making the project's early songs without editing or reconsidering anything -- "I just made them" -- as a deliberate reaction against more composed, deliberate songwriting he's found exhausting elsewhere. That refusal is audible: the crescendos don't build toward a payoff so much as keep escalating past the point a more careful arrangement would have pulled back, as if the recording caught the feeling before it could be revised into something smaller. The songs read less like compositions than like transcripts.

The occult reading Andrzejewski did for years -- Crowley, Jack Parsons, the practicing-magician comic writers like Alan Moore -- wasn't research for lyrics. It's closer to how he's described the project itself: a name and a persona treated as a working, something you say and then have to live inside of. That's a genuinely different premise than most genre-hopping artists work from: the songwriting voice doesn't change to fit trap beats, witch-house synths, or, on Mossy Oak Shadow, a full acoustic band; the belief structure underneath stays constant, and the sound is just whatever it currently needs to move through. Melancholy, in that frame, isn't a mood so much as a fixed point the music keeps returning to from different directions.