Giles Corey

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.