For a while, I'd wanted to make a proper death metal album. I'd also wanted to make an album with lyrics entirely in Japanese. So, in January, I decided to take care of both goals at once: I'd make a death metal album with lyrics in Japanese! Of course, it didn't end up being entirely death metal and not all of the lyrics are in Japanese, but it is mostly death metal and most of the lyrics are in Japanese, so...

This is my first album where I used an actual bass and not a guitar tuned down insanely low (for the entire album). Well, if CEADGB and BEADGC tunings count as "insanely low", then I guess all of the songs do have guitars in insanely low tunings, but at least they have bass (at some parts four-string tuned CEAD or BEAD and at some parts five-string tuned CEADG or BEADG). Of course I also used fretless bass, so in some songs there's fretless bass tuned also CEAD and BEAD.

In tracks 2, 6 and 7 there are parts with sanshin. Obviously it's an instrument that I can't play well yet, so I didn't want to overuse it, which is why only those tracks have it and it's not "highlighted" much. In track 7, there's also taishōgoto/electric harp.

Track 1 has some clean vocals that sound bad, I'm aware. I tried re-recording them several times, but the first take remained the best. In the end, I think it ended up being fine but I guess for some people it'll ruin the song or even the entire album. Anyway, it's by far the most complex song on this album; it has time signature and tempo changes all the time, while most of the songs have relatively few odd time signatures and either few or no tempo changes at all. For both of these reasons, I made it the first song on the album. The lyrics should have two pretty obvious interpretations, and I had both in mind when writing them, so... well, I mean, other interpretations are probably also possible.

Track 2 also has some clean vocals that don't sound the best, and I have proof that people don't like them since I released it as a single and the average listen time on Youtube is almost exactly up to when the clean vocals come in. You'd think I should've removed or at least re-recorded them, but I'm satisfied with them so I didn't. Well, it might also be the fact that it stops being metal and turns into psychedelic wtf music at those parts... but if you want "trve metal" with no clean vocals or weird stuff, maybe consider listening to something else. The lyrics are kind of the same thing as a horror story I wrote once upon a time.

Track 3 has very little meaning to it, possibly reflected by the random unnecessarily long pseudo-jazz part that may ruin the whole song for some people. It has influences from circus music because, well, the little meaning it has is "circus horror" or whatever. It's absolutely not related to a certain term used by certain groups to refer to the world; if you interpret it that way, your interpretation is wrong. I may have gone overboard with the pick scrapes in this song, but it's heavy, right?

Track 4 is literally about a scary clown. Not even any particular scary clown, just some scary clown. So, it's kind of a continuation of the previous song. It has some serious dissonance especially in the intro because who doesn't like dissonance? Well, okay, there was a more practical reason for that (a mistake when recording) but I liked how it sounded. At some parts it might cross the line into being almost nu metal? Oof.

Track 5 is like the obligatory torture murder song that death metal's roots lie in. There are two main true crimes the lyrics are drawn from, one committed in Japan and one committed in America, but it's not meant as a song about either and has some changed and fictional details. It has some of the "riffiest" riffs on this album, but I tried to balance out the almost pseudo-oldschool-ish vibe with some weird effects, clean vocals and the intro and outro.

Track 6 was actually the first song I made for this album, and recorded the sanshin to it a bit later. I struggled with what to call it because the original title I came up with was really clunky and overly long, it was a full sentence... meanwhile the lyrics are the least meaningful on the album, in addition to being the most garbled in pronunciation. The reason for that is that I recorded them while trying to cough up tonsil stones. I meant to re-record them, but none of the attempts had the same "impact". It's arguably also the only song on this album with something that could be called guitar solos, and even those are very short.

Track 7 is basically a remade version of a song I made in 2018, just longer and more coherent. It also has a part with lyrics in something like "pseudo-Proto-Sino-Tibetan", as in Proto-Sino-Tibetan words but with simplified pronunciation and basically no grammar. Considering the subject matter of the song, it felt fitting. Of course you could argue that I should've just used Tibetan, but... tbh I'd just read some linguistic paper about Proto-Sino-Tibetan when I wrote that song's lyrics, haha. If you've heard the original version and are wondering if this version also includes my lowest growl and highest scream, no, but it does include that weird noise you probably wished you'd never have to hear again. It's just a defining part of the song, you know?

Track 8 is just a basic outro song, really.

Just as usual, I'm not putting any of the lyrics of any songs anywhere publicly. If you can make them out by listening, that's OK, but if you can't, that's OK. I hope they're grammatically correct (and for the most part I'm pretty sure they are, but I've probably slipped up at times), but the lyrics aren't as important as the music itself.