The song sizzles into earshot, and the instrumentation is already shrill and fuzzy. And immediately, when you hear the first lyrics, you understand that the music is just emulating the words, or is it the other way around?
Georgie, the vocalist of Dillon Jo, sounds like she is singing into a merciless void, an obstinate corridor, an empty well. And the words start out navel-gazing, but then everything sounds like a plea, a call for instantaneous aid, rather than idle philosophy.
“I want to leave, but where would I go,” is the feeling of being stuck in a loop like you would be if you were “tangled in the washing machine,” until its cycle was done. The pointed use of the appliance, the washing machine, something that is supposed to clean and refresh your clothes, your exterior, seems very notable because it could be referencing the fact that she has tried every conventional method of cleansing herself of this plague of feeling dizzy, but they have all been shallow and focused on the façade of it all, the clothes, and not the interior world of her mind.
“I hear a beeping, a deafening hum.” The plight of existential pain is constant and unrecognizable to anyone but yourself, and that is why she then goes, “I’m in a coma I can’t wake up from,” because what is more isolating than being comatose? What gives way to more of a distance between you and everyone else than being unconscious and unable to communicate with anyone?
Even the instrumental, as mentioned before, starts out shrill and ear-splitting. There’s that sound of disorientation. And you can find it, see it, and notice it anywhere. Even in your bedsheets, as Dillon Jo mentions in the first verse.
And more than anything else, this song is about feeling stuck and wanting to get rid of yourself, remove yourself from the situation, just to see a change in your state of being. How will being dead be different from feeling dead? But then, in the end, you do not go through with it. You even drive the ones around you up a wall, but you don’t mean to: “I didn’t hold it against you,” but the anger and frustration that you externalize and the reason you lash out at others happen because you’re trying to feel something, to stay alive, to survive: “I just held it together.”
Alternatively, these lines could point to the polar opposite interpretation: that you hold it together and internalize everything in order to avoid holding it against everybody else and hurting them.
Throughout the song, the instrumental is bristled and fuzzy. Indecipherable. It is just noise some of the time. A cacophony of wind-blown static. Except in the verses when she is trying to make sense of what is happening to her and parse out her surroundings beyond the spinning. As if she can thwart the ambiguity with her confessions of feeling helpless and stuck. Even in the bridge, the instrumental is complaint with the vocals as it winds down to let you hear her when she is being honest and vulnerable. Trying to work through this maelstrom makes it less vertiginous then. Even more so than killing yourself would.
But the good news is that you do not go through with it. And honestly, it makes more sense to try and get through it instead.
Written by Leo August
