She destroyed the hopes and dreams of a generation of faux-romantics and he's not pleased. It's not as much of a diversion as many assumed, as longtime followers will know - they've done breakup songs (Straight In At 101), self pity (Miserabilia) and slowed down musical introspection (Who Fell Asleep In) before, it's just the circumstances of Gareth's lyric writing were made more public this time. He's even resourced the title Every Defeat A Divorce before. All the same it feels like a continuation, albeit a very dark at times one, of what we wrote about last year at about this time, the way their albums plot the band's collective growing process from naive joy to young adulthood mental hammer blows. Throughout there are dead bodies, mutilation and Olympian levels of spite and jealousy but also a certain level of good memories where the lines of the body are "cartography in every scar" (and, because this is the poetry of a pathologically honest man, where the hope is she'll remember him for the oral sex), while behind the band stretch out, languid marches and sometimes National-recalling elegance in numbers replacing the sugar rush. In Heat Rash #1, discussing In Medias Res, Gareth wrote "I seem to spend my life flitting between complete nihilism and a debilitating yearning for happiness and contentment". Yeah, that's about it.
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