Teen Suicide – “The Stomach Of The Earth”

Teen Suicide – “The Stomach Of The Earth”

An album as long and ambitious as Teen Suicide’s latest, It’s The Big Joyous Celebration, Let’s Stir The Honeypot (26 tracks!), has to have some sort of demarcation point to avoid feeling overwhelming, and for the Brooklyn-via-Baltimore band, it’s a separation of the record down the middle so there’s a rock-oriented side and more ambient, electroacoustic experimentation on the flip. Lead single “Alex” comes from the first half, while “The Stomach Of The Earth” is taken from the back end. It’s a mood piece held in the same formation pattern, as a gently nudging and escalating piano line eventually breaks out into a pitch-shifted dirge of a coda: “Will I rest my head in heaven? Will I sleep in the stomach of the earth?” The lyrics, though largely unintelligible, still echo the weariness of the song’s conceit, which Sam Ray explains to Thump as such:

This song is about purgatory. There’s a kind of purgatory that comes with being a drug addict, when you do the same things constantly every day and have only one goal and one desire at all times, and there’s a kind of purgatory that comes with getting sober and being a normal person, when life consists of nothing but small, forgettable moments and places. Sitting by a lake, getting your hair cut, going to the bank, even just deciding whether or not to shower on any given day, it all becomes the same boring, eternal thing. This song is mostly about that latter kind of purgatory, but also about purgatory in a more literal sense.

Listen below.

It’s The Big Joyous Celebration, Let’s Stir The Honeypot is out 4/1 via Run For Cover. Pre-order it here.

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