Track By Tracks: Symbiotic Growth - Beyond The Sleepless Aether (2025)

About the album as a whole (LYRICALLY & MUSICALLY):

Like the last album, this one is once again based in fiction and is lyrically conceptual, but dives more into more thoughts and emotions of everyday life, and sometimes those thoughts are hard to deal with.

Every song has its own identity and its place within the story, taking our protagonist through the multiverse, placing him in places like dark wooded forests, wide open desert landscapes, and the unending cosmos.

As an album, the songs tackle strong feelings of loneliness, a sense of being, self-hatred, and suicide. Some of which are blatant and easy to see and others subtly through the course of the album, lyrically and musically.

Track By Track:

1. Of Painted Skies And Dancing Lights lyrically starts our journey with the protagonist of our story standing in the forest, staring up at the night sky, taking in the beauty that is the northern lights, and reflecting on life and what may be beyond it. All the while, the music helps to build the scenery sonically with a repetitive theme that keeps building into an eventual release that breaks into more intense passages that coincide with his reflection of life.

2. Spires Of The Boundless Sunset takes us to a different reality where he surprisingly finds himself upon an old church, abandoned long ago, where nature has started to reclaim its rightful place, wondering how he arrived at such a place, with everything feeling different but somehow the same. He then starts to see what's happening and how he was transported there. The rhythmic pacing interweaved with the choir-like synth of the intro/verse riff builds on the wonder of the new environment that he's arrived in. The rest of the song continues to build on that wonder and curiosity with more laid-back chordy parts, letting the bass parts do more of the heavy lifting melodically.

3. The Architect Of Annihilation lets more of Devin's clean vocals shine by taking a more upfront approach in our techier track on the album. The riff-heavy song features a lot call and response type vocals between Aaron and Devin, giving more variety to an already well-versed song. As the longest song on the album, it has more of a story to tell lyrically, taking heavy inspiration from the movie Princess Mononoke. We find ourselves in a world where industry is taking over and destroying all of nature in its wake. He sees this all in what he perceives to be a dream, only to find out that it has all happened before and that what he experienced is a warning for the future.

4. The Sleepless Void is the darkest, most brooding song on the album not only musicaly but also lyrically. This time our protagonist finds himself in land where all things “horror” live and thrive, he encounters everything from warewolves, vampires, creepy little “ring” girls, to Azathoth himself. In around this part of the story our protagonist starts to get tired and weary of all these changing landscapes, wishing it all to end.

5. Arid Trials And Barren Sands is a sludgier start to the song takes us to a desert landscape where, water is a scarcity and the extreme heat leaves our protagonist delirous and unsure of everything thats happening. Is he seeing all his different lives through the multiverse because he's supposed to be some kind of savior, or does any of it even matter? The music lends itself to the lyrics like sounds incorporating leads with mirage-like tremolo effects and some “larger than life” choruses helping to build his thoughts of grandeur.

6. Lost In Fractured Reveries On the last stop through his journey on the prog-iest song on the album he finds himself floating within the cosmos, seeing all of time and every universe being woven together like a web, contemplating his entire existance, whether he ever even mattered in any time or in any universe. The jumping time signatures and tempo changes lend a hand to the uncertainty that feels within the song.

7. Trading Thoughts For Sleep slows everything down and turns up the melancholy. An in-depth view of how our protagonist feels after everything he's experienced, his struggle with finding meaning in life, his place in everything and the anxiety of it all. The feeling that if he were no longer around, nothing would change and things would just move on, and the relief it would bring him to no longer feel that way.