At the top, Congratulations

My favorite new song that just will not leave my brain

Pierce Trahan
7 min readDec 15, 2022

Continuing my new series of my favorite things of 2022, I haven’t been able to dial down my top 10 of music this year, hopefully that’s a weekend project I can knock out — it’s going to be a lot of me blaring albums one-by-one in the dark, I can’t wait. In the meantime, let me tell you the story of a little band called half alive.

Take it back to late summer 2018, freshly laid-off and crashing at my brother’s apartment grinding Dota 2 on the eve of the best tournament I’ll ever watch, The International 2018, I put on my Discover Weekly courtesy of my great love Spotify, and within the first three songs I found a song and band that would immediately stake a claim in my pantheon of incredible finds.

For anyone that knew me at the time, I undoubtedly showed off this song to anyone and everyone I could find. “still feel” was a single that gripped me when it first graced my ears, but the song elevated itself when, later that night, I clicked over to YouTube to find this.

The concept and execution took me and my brother for a shock. I think we might have watched it five times in a row honestly. “still feel” has a certain groove to it that was unlike anything that was coming out in Indie music at the time besides maybe Sir Sly or Lewis Del Mar. After obsessing over both the auditory and visual aspects of “still feel”, I went down a rabbit hole of half alive — too be fair a short rabbit hole, they only had a total of four songs at this point in time released — and stamped their first album release on my mental calendar.

Cut to 2019, their first album, Now, Not Yet is released too good audience and critical reception, but not fanfare per se. It was reminiscent of the first The 1975 record for myself personally, high peaks but some pretty low valleys overall. It was a record that in retrospect lacked confidence in the song writing and construction. While I still go back and listen to the great singles off that record, the album as a whole has not grown on me in repeated listens. I didn’t write off half alive, I had seen them live at this point and knew that they were too invested in their art to not come back with something stronger on LP 2.

Now enter COVID. All of music and culture halts, no one is sure what to do about anything, how and when should content be released? With the uncertainty around the entire medium, half alive began releases singles and EPs for two years, until three weeks ago when their 2nd studio album finally got its release. Conditions of a Punk is an album that comes with a leap of confidence and song writing creativity that has me playing this record on repeat for the last three days. Coming in at just under an hour and at a track list of 18, the scale of production took a giant step up.

As a three-piece band, half alive plays with minimalism in their song construction, but uses their minimalist tendencies to lean on bombastic drum sounds and emphatic synth lines to fill the space. And it’s never felt larger and with greater depth than now. You can hear the influences of Bon Iver, The Strokes, Hippo Campus, and The 1975 all at different stages of the record as Josh Taylor — the lead singer — talks in depth of struggles during the pandemic time and trying to maintain sanity in the face of pure insanity.

That message never hits hard than the true stand out tracks from the album, “Nobody” and “Never Been Better”. Where in “Nobody” Taylor details the struggles of growing up and realizing that he’s in a rigged system that demands that you be at the top — COUGH COUGH HE’S TALKING ABOUT CAPTALISM IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY.

Nobody

Watch me take it over, move your body over
Make a little room for me
See ’em at the top or leave ’em at the bottom
Focus on the come up, become someone
Movin’ up the ladder doesn’t really matter
As long as I’m in the lead
See ’em at the top, but leave ’em at the bottom
Focus on the come up, become someone

As we’ve been conditioned our entire lives to believe, move your way up the ladder of whatever industry you’re in, it doesn't matter what you have to do or who you have to move out of the way, as long as you’re in the lead at the end of the day, because it’s all justified by becoming “someone”.

The more that I grow, the more that I’ve come to know
Yeah, it’s hard to be someone
And it hurts to be nobody
Playin’ this game, it’s easy to lose both ways
Yeah, it’s hard to be someone
And it hurts to be nobody

It’s an awakening to the realization that this is a system that punishes both the ladder climber, and the one who is stepped over, it’s a no-win situation for all involved but the ones who put the ladder there in the first place.

Purpose on a pedestal, I’m lookin’ back at you
Look what I have done, look what I can do
Yeah, oh
But imagine me having nothing to prove and nothing to lose
And have the courage to be nobody, nobody, nobody
Nobody could hold me down

This is about the most punk concept said on the entire record. Josh illustrates that it’s easy to excuse any choices you make along the way to “making it” by having your purpose for them on a pedestal above everyone and everything else. But he rejects that in the second half to argue that it’s actually more courageous to fight against that notion and refuse to be a ladder climber. There is a freedom to being nobody.

This is where the album name starts to hit, Conditions of a Punk. Very quickly let’s make something abundantly clear that has been made murky by modern media, the counter-culture movement that the Punk movement is an extension of, is inherently anti-capitalistic in nature, it’s never been “punk” to be pro-capitalist, no matter what people who play Rage Against the Machine at a Republican rally think.

While “Nobody” is the first true brow raising song on the record, it is quickly joined by Never Been Better.

Never Been Better

This is the true stand out track of the record for me, while it doesn’t follow the same thematic concepts “Nobody” it paves the way as probably my favorite pandemic tune released. Josh brings us into his own version of a Julian Casablancas story, as we join him through a situation where someone asks him a simple question which spirals his mind.

Hey, you
What you’ve been up to?”
You asked me last night
You said it looks like you’re living your best life
I said, “Never
I’ve never been better”
’Cause that’s what it looks like
I didn’t wanna change your mind

If your life has not gone the way you expected or wanted it to since 2020, this feels like an exact scenario that too many people have been in. In a time of general bad vibes, correcting someone when they project happiness and contentment onto your life isn’t worth the trouble.

How do I explain to a stranger (Ooh)
I’m not having a good year
I say I’m great, move on with my day
(Ooh)
’Cause the truth’s too much to hear

It’s often better to just fake it in the face of such optimism than to break the heart of the person who thinks so much of you.

At the top, congratulations
Heart so full, I know I’ll break it
If I fall and hit the pavement, I’m
Lookin’ down, my head is racing (My head is racing)
Scared of all these dreams I’m chasing (Oh)
On the edge, like I said, I’ve

The hypnotic guitar and bass grooves on “Never Been Better” compliment the melancholic feeling of the situation presented in, this is where The Strokes influence comes out in spades in the best way. When the chorus hits, the spacey guitar line sends you into this stunning reverb planet dripping with sonic depth. The drums come in simple but constant, they are the backbone of why this song sounds like it’s skips and jumps as you’re listening — not the old CD version of skipping and jumping, thank god.

The background vocal’s courtesy of Orla Gartland puts you in a sound space unlike the rest of the record and it’s something I hope they return to as a concept, it’s truly a gorgeous mix together — no joke, every time the “ooh’s” come in on the 2nd verse my ears smile.

Listen to the whole album, it’s tremendous and an example of such incredible growth by a band. I would love to write about the whole album, but I’ve got so many more things to write about before the year is done that I’m going to call it good here and start working on my first movie write up. Spoilers it’s going to be Ambulance :)

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Pierce Trahan

I just write stuff sometimes, maybe often now, not sure