Released April 9, 2025.
A collection of demos, rares, and other unreleased material
Well, I have been anticipating and dreading this day for my entire conscious life. Regardless of how I feel about it, I am now an "adult" at 18 years old. This has always been something I've hated the thought of since I was a little kid, like 5 or 6. The day I turned 9 years old, I cried the whole day because it meant I was halfway to being 18. Same thing happened when I was 13, because it meant that I was now a teenager. When I was turning 17 just last year I had a total meltdown about it for months. I couldn't eat or sleep without feeling this total sense of doom, like I was going to fucking die. The fact it was getting closer meant adulthood wasn't just this nebulous thing that would happen in "the future", it was real now, and it'd be here very soon.
I hate this. I don't know what else to say. I thought I'd be more warmed up to the idea of turning 18 by the time it actually happened, but I'm not. I feel the same way about it now that I did when I was 17, 13, 7, 6, 5. It's terrifying, I'm terrified. I don't know what's going to happen now but whatever it is I'm not prepared at all. People have already started treating me more like an autonomous individual in the past several months and it always bugs the hell out of me. For the past few days, I've just been going into my room after school and crying for an hour or two before I can fulfill any of my obligations, which I have accumulated a lot of over the years.
It's difficult that "childhood" has officially ended, even if I know that it ended long before I turned 18. I'd say my childhood ended and adolescence began for me around the time I turned 12. That's when the focus of my life shifted away purely from play and entertainment and towards relationships with others, which, to me, is the real mark of the end of childhood. I still remember the last time I ever "played". I was 11 years old in my room with my Legos just as I had been almost every day of my life for years now. This time, though, something just didn't feel right. It wasn't the same. I wasn't able to construct the same narratives and play them out through my Lego creations as I had before. I recognized, as a childhood obsessed kid even then, that this was a very bad sign.
I sat on my bed and cried, then I put my Legos up, and I have never gotten them out since. Some days since I've humored the idea of getting them out again, but thought it'd just be a pointless reliving of the happiest times of my life that would only make me more miserable. I'm crying typing this out now thinking about it. I realize now that my art, especially earlier carnations of it, are just an extension of play. Only now instead of exercising creativity through toys, I'm exercising it through more strictly defined "tools" like guitars and things. At the end of the day, I'm still doing this because it's fun and it's still play.
If I ever truly stopped playing with toys, then I wouldn't be making music.
