Track By Tracks: Nullor - Finalform (2025)

1. Maladjusted:

I remember coming up with the verse rhythm of 2 single pulses and 2 double pulses over a 6/4 signature driving to work one morning. A lot of these songs start from noodling with simple polyrhythms. Once I had the guitar rhythm decided, on a whim I tried stuffing bass notes in all the places where the guitar WASN’T playing, and I didn’t hate it. That’s in the final mix through every verse and pre-chorus; they’re NEVER playing together until the chorus. Lyrically I’m painting the idea of we-the-governed accusing and condemning the leaders that have let us down, as it seems to have come up a bit recently?

2. Finalform:

It’s probably the most personal song to me on the album, mostly about getting old and knowing there’s an ending, everyone hits it eventually. If it’s tomorrow, this week/month/year, then seeing me now is seeing what will turn out to be my final form. Not exactly deprecating anything I’ve done in my life, but this is what I have, what I’ve become over the time. It probably never feels like enough to anyone. Like seeing a picture labelled “taken days before death’ it’s a chilling thing. It’s morose, absolutely, but it’s the kind of thing that crops up in my brain now and then.

3. Nothing:

The music was written while my last band was dying on the vine and none of us were brave enough to say, “hey this is dying, isn’t it?” It was kind of an eye opener for me that I could write all the music myself and maybe should if I want to see anything get done. I love getting the flat 2 (F in this case) in my writing. In final analysis, it can probably be construed as being in F, but at least in parts it’s flat 2 in E. The general theme of the song is that owning and owing are unnatural constructs, born of a system built to keep us in debt and paying the corporate bros forever. The whole spoken word part is entirely the near-unbearable corporate lingo bullshit-speak I’ve encountered in my years of working, which turned out better than I thought it would.

4. Aforethought:

This one is about how in pretty much every society in the world, women aren’t equal. Sometimes by a little, normally by quite a lot. It seems like part of being a woman in today’s world requires tolerating all the worst garbage that’s been bred and trained into men for eons, through tradition, religion, societal convention, what have you. The only reason women aren’t equal is because part of being a man in today's world includes either holding women down or expecting them to take on all the things men don’t want to. There aren’t any laws that say women should be cooking the food, raising the children, washing the clothes, cleaning the place we live; yet it works out that way time and time again. It’s such a common, familiar norm, and it’s just ridiculous when you think about fairness and equality.

5. Here:

This song came out of a riff I recorded on a 4-track so long ago. A decade, maybe more. It was in my list of song starts and pieces that Mikey, the singer, was combing through and took a liking to. I seriously had no intention for it whatsoever, but he built a lyrical pattern and wrote some words around it that really progressed it in a way I’d never imagined. The “orchestration” in the middle is a selection of virtual instruments in Cubase; the piano, oboe, French horns, trombones, cello, violas, I think there’s a flute in there somewhere? I just kept stacking more and more moving parts into it until I caught myself loading up “glockenspiel” and thought “maybe I have enough already.” Not to disparage glockenspiels. Perhaps it’ll make the next album.

6. Overdrive:

The only reason this song isn’t called “Oblivion Overdrive” is that I was having too much fun forcing all the song titles to just one word. I have just always liked that aesthetic, simple, unassuming. And kind of challenging at times. This is about the deterioration of the planet at the hands of those kinds of corporations, who would opt to pay the fine for polluting the planet because it costs less than cleaning up after the mess made by their industry. I still really like the chords of the bridge, pretty much all just trial and error. “That note is boring. That note clashes awfully. That note clashes in a fun way, let’s use that. Oh, shit now where do I go?” Took a minute.

7. Devolver:

The weirdo. I number all my little song starts and pieces and play through them from time to time, seeing if anything lights up in my head. One fateful day I thought #5 and #11 might go together. Whether they really did or not, I Frankensteined them together anyway. It’s probably immediately obvious that it sounds kind of like shifting gears into something totally different and then back again. So, I used that differentiating duality to make the lyrics about something in orbit decaying into the atmosphere, with one set of words from the point of view of the orbiter, and another from a third party witnessing it. SCIENCE! (NERD!)

8. Remains:

Shoutout to Brandon Grigsby, who did a lot of guitar work on this one, solo and melody lines. This song was waiting in the wings to be part of the previously mentioned band’s catalog. It’s not that the song wasn’t good enough to make it or was passed over, we just had so much existing material we were churning through so slowly, it was either throw it at the back of the enormous line and wait forever to see it evolve or evolve it myself. Maybe this song is the one that really convinced me to start finishing all the song starts I’d been accumulating. It’s got some wonky angry chords in it.

9. Letdown:

Another angry “stop shitting where we all live and eat” kind of song. In hindsight I probably pushed the bridge too far. It all culminates into feeling generally let down by the greed we see from our fellow humans every day, the crimes against nature and ourselves.