Track By Tracks: Traversus - Navigate (2025)

There is so much going on that it’s sometimes hard to just live your life. International safety is in shambles because of wars, and even in the Netherlands, the political situation is starting to get gruesome. We’re constantly battling with feelings of hope and despair, combativeness and fatigue, gratitude and sadness. As young adults trying to navigate and make sense of the world, music is a very powerful tool. That’s how Navigate came to life.

1. Headline Anxiety:

We live in a digital age, where live news is delivered to you constantly. You can’t open any news or social media platform without reading about all the horrible things that are going on. Being exposed to this on a daily basis can take a toll on your mental health, and it’s hard to deal with. Psychiatrists came up with a term for this in recent years: headline anxiety - feeling overwhelmed and anxious due to constant exposure to negative news. The song describes how difficult it is to contribute to activism while also staying sane and keeping your mental health in check.

2. No Way To Silence Me:

This song is supposed to empower people. It describes how the richest people and politicians constantly fail the people and take advantage of them. But we should have hope and keep speaking up, even if it seems to be in vain.

3. Eye to Eye:

Eye to Eye is about how you can lose yourself in a world that makes no sense. Written out of feelings of despair and anger, it poses so many questions, but answers none.

4. Maybe In Another Life:

In theme, this song is a continuation of Eye To Eye. It describes how hard it is to constantly deal with not being taken seriously - whether that’s about you personally or bigger causes that you care about - and how easy it would be to just disappear, whatever that may mean to you. Maybe there will be another life in which things seem less crooked.

5. When The World Goes To Waste:

As a biologist, Madelief is very passionate about nature and everything it entails. Climate change and pollution are things she is worried about. This song is an urgent, rage-filled letter to all the people who think these issues won’t affect them. Especially the richest people think they can get away with anything. The wealthiest 10% are responsible for two-thirds of the observed global warming since 1990, and they don’t seem to care. But once parts of the world become uninhabitable, water will no longer be clean, and the world is going to shit, even they will be screwed.

6. Dead Hands:

Where the previous song is mostly written out of anger, Dead Hands tries to calmly continue the conversation. Conveying feelings of exhaustion, caused by trying to do good, but constantly being sabotaged by the big leaders and corporations. We naively hope they will change their mind. And we’re prepared to do whatever it takes.

That’s where Navigate ends. It is dedicated to anyone who has lost a life trying to fight for what is right.