Unreal Track-By-Track Breakdown Dead Eyes

This song is spooky-ooky-oO0OoO0Oo… We wrote this song for an elementary school Halloween event and they ended up not using it and not paying us. When we first wrote this song we called it No Knife because it reminded us of the band No Knife. We were very lucky to get Kay Morrisette to contribute hauntingly beautiful backing vocals which really completed the song.

Every Minute Matters

This is one of the 2 slower songs on the album. The inspiration for the opening line came from the band Girls Against Boys. The bass line is very stretchy and hard to play. Trevor was listening to Protomartyr a lot when we wrote this.

Spiders

This one has always been very in your face. If anything, adding synth made it a little less rash. We like to say the synth makes the song kind of sound like a power pop, 80s, Mentos commercial. This is a standard sad boi emo break-up song.

Shrine

We had always referred to this song as Twin Peaks until we finally had to give it a real name. It reminds us of Julee Cruise (RIP). Garrett got really mad at us on tour last summer because we accidentally drove past the Twin Peaks Diner and didn’t realize it until way too late. The song takes heavy inspiration from the band My Dad Is Dead. This was originally going to be the only track Kay sang on because it was her favorite song.

Red Line Season

The intro riff to this song reminded us of the band These Arms Are Snakes, who have a song called “Red Line Season”. Garrett ended up writing lyrics to this song around that working title, and then it became the final song name.

Heart Attack

Trevor saw a man texting and driving on a motorcycle with his helmet on. Jake made the intro riff and we built the song together from there. Garrett bought Hawaiian t-shirts.

Sleepwalker

This is the first song we finished. This one was already pretty spooky before we added synth. The backup vocals on this song were kind of an accident but they added to the spooky feel so we kept them. The guitar hook was inspired by Pinback.

Pretend

Another power pop song. It’s a nice love song.

Dirty Blue

Dirty Blue is another song we wrote all together starting with a bass line. We originally called it “No Rush, Neil Peart’s Dead”. We really like that the chorus doesn't have actual lyrics.

Jungle Gardenia

We had a lot of fun writing the synth parts for this song. We ended up cutting out a lot of radio DJ sound effects and Peewee’s Playhouse noises. The lyrics were inspired by a scene from the documentary Paris Is Burning.

Skin Crawler

This was the last song we wrote but we put it last on the record because it was the last song we wrote. It’s about an underground cult and trying to break free from that mind control and how you may have been changed from this while still trying to move on and forget, trying to wriggle away from under all of the dirt and escape. We wrote this song last.