This year, outside of outstanding hip-hop releases, has been the year of the weirdo metal projects for me. Usually one-person projects, always intriguing, it’s been a year that I think has pushed the genre into newer territory than I’ve noticed in quite a while. I mean, look at the shit that just dropped last week. Spoiler, there’s even more real rousing, unique metal coming your way in the next little stretch of time here, the first hit of it is undeniably docking into station now as Hypomanic Daydream, a project I hadn’t heard of until it landed on our review list. Maybe you haven’t heard of it either – let’s learn together.
Described by my pal Toni as ‘wild Voivod shit‘ to help contextualize what The Yearning‘s about, even a progressive, broad comparison like that comes up hopelessly short. The sole brain behind the project, Manic Dream Girl, sings post-punky cleans, falsetto reminiscent of Tiny Tim or Messiah Marcolin (Candlemass), and a growl that often skirts close to black metal grit. Guitars run a similar gamut from the heavy, chrome-like sheen prog tones of Devin Townsend to more disjointed and offbeat melodies like, well, Voivod I suppose. The Yearning is packed with dense variety that begets an intricate listen where, even if you find it too scattered, you still might find it hard to find fault with the individual elements as they are presented.
What I mean by that is even on paper, The Yearning seems to do everything right in a progressive metal realm, however vague those parameters might be, but in practice some might not gel well with the frantic and diverse way they come together. But we’re not here to talk about them, are we? For me, it’s a fine web of exacted upon influences that, once you know them, things start to add up from a conceptual standpoint at the very least. The Yearning draws ‘from soaring 90’s RPG battle themes, the bizarre reaches of metal, and the titans of the Rock in Opposition movement‘ so says the Bandcamp page. Not required knowledge, but knowing it makes the bleak synth intro of “O Property, My Property!” start to make sense as it sounds like the theme for a particularly dank and difficult castle midway through a SNES RPG where you’ll fight a boss who will then join your own party after defeat (at a neutered power level of course).
Speaking of themes, they’re similarly dense, perhaps cryptic at times from an outsider’s point of view with lyrics opening doors to daring-do and self-destruction alike. The flagellating intro track “Dissociative” shakily sings, ‘For every yearning that’s inside you/Still lies some horror to subsume‘ and I found it to be a poignant, overall theory statement for the album. The title track for instance revels in sapphic yearning by way of body horror, totally entranced by another and yet the language is not only of love or even lust, but a secret third, much more sinister thing:
‘Forms contort, as flesh is churned
She’s getting closer and turning blind
Dripping soul, a twilight burned
Pierce through the thick skin, and reach inside
Adoring queer, a fluttered heart
This sapphic quenching, I’m paralyzed
Without fear, a glory’d start
Enraptured by gaze, Her pair of eyes’
The switch from glorious falsetto to a graveled call captures the duality of a new love, at once celestial and others cracking your mental sinews when you think of giving all of yourself to someone. It’s scary! It’s violent in some ways to claw yourself out of yourself to foster connection and growth, risking the vulnerability needed for something that may not be worth it, or perhaps I’m too pessimistic about it. Either way, Hypomanic Daydream have crafted one of the most interesting songs about love and longing I’ve ever heard, especially in metal’s realm.
“I Wanna Be” is more cloistered and wounded. Clean, spacy synths clash with a slower tempo of angular guitars and drums until the song accelerates into a tirade of quick metal as the lyrics form a screed of unhealthy connection and judgment blinded by more red flags than a communist rally. It’s unsettling, but still wholly coherent, which honestly makes it more unsettling because it shows how the brain can battle on the knife’s edge of reason and total submission to someone. Some of the best music rests on the album closer, “Enshitification”, a word which was coined by writer Cory Doctorow, but popularized to me by nonbinary finery culture and gaming critic Stephanie Sterling, referring to how everything online will eventually greatly diminish as a service or offering until it’s useless or otherwise not worthy of the time or money demanded by customers as company and shareholder profits soar inversely to it until death. The song, unsurprisingly, tackles it in its own way, that is to say progressively – the guitar tones are among the crispest here, there’s haunting bass clarinet toward the end of the track, and synths sound more alarming as if signaling the sinking of a financial ship and bankrupting itself into oblivion all in the name of greed.
Eight tracks of sonic bitterness make up The Yearning and each one seems to resonate harder than the last. Like dark chocolate, the bold flavor isn’t for everyone – there’s friends that I know like prog metal I can show this to and they’d spit it out, respectfully though no less pleased with or caught off guard by its taste. For others with the palate for it, you may find yourself like me singing the hook to “Dissociative” loudly in your head as a mantra after several loops, or admiring the vocal depth and charm on “Tailspin of the Atmostrider”, a song that probably has the most in common with the classic prog rock scene Hypomanic Daydream rests one foot within, but still darkens its skies with smoke from fire and death. The album just feels like a broken kaleidoscope of colors and textures, all fighting to be seen, heard, and understood, and somehow you begin to build empathy for everything among the alluring tumult.
The Yearning is at times desperate, but always disparate with how it combines wide-reaching elements across the spectrum of weirdo prog music. It absolutely works and while it’s not a wonder how it’s accomplished (Manic Dream Girl just seems to be a consummate musician and writer which enables the music to work on a level many others couldn’t do), it is wonderful to me as a project. Like, I haven’t heard anything quite like this in my life until now. I can of course draw comparisons with individual sections, but then in comes another totally different one that crashes into the former, beaching them both on an island of eclectic playfulness driven by deep, devilish desire and cosmic levels of collapse around it. For as much as we collectively yearn, so too do we have to contend with abject horror to get what we want. Hypomanic Daydream doesn’t provide answers or advice for this – it’s clear we’re all in this struggle together, still figuring it out, still getting burnt by the proverbial stove. Maybe the ultimate question The Yearning asks implicitly through its themes and chaos is, is it all worth it?
