Some albums invite you in with warmth and familiarity, while others challenge you to navigate their complexities, rewarding you with deeper meaning on every listen. FHMY’s The World You Grew Up In No Longer Exists is firmly in the latter category. An ambitious, deeply personal sonic experience that blends elements of math rock, shoegaze, post-rock, and electronic experimentation into an album that feels like both a haunting memory and an unsettling dream. Over the course of ten songs, FHMY creates an emotional terrain with a sense of nostalgia, loneliness, and self-discovery. Drawing a plethora of influences, the Egyptian artist creates a rich tapestry of interweaving guitar lines, lush synths, and distorted samples that evoke a sense of dislocation and yearning.
The album begins with Egyptian Football, a glistening math-rock piece with tumbling guitar layers that draw you in slowly before shifting into memoriesyouwillneverfeelagain, a hypnotic song constructed on an unbalanced groove and exquisitely bizarre guitar machinations. These two tracks establish the tone for the album—emotionally dense, technically complex, and profoundly introspective.
You Can't Live There Forever is a great example of FHMY's capacity to combine sensitive sample work with colossal post-rock ascensions, and it ranks as one of the most intense and moving tracks on the album. Chery! Oh Chery! is a math-rock treat, filled with energy and accuracy, and it provides a welcome respite from the album's darker sections.
One of the high points of the album arrives with my blue heaven, a song written in collaboration with AQL. Ethereal and dreamy, but laced with brasher harmonics, the track encapsulates the album's dance of push and pull between harmony and discord. The title track, an instrumental that tacks deeply into math rock's eccentric time signatures while shimmering with an otherworldly presence, continues the album's surreal haze.
I Keep on Not Dying is another collaboration with AQL on the album, which brings out the gritty distortion guitar with a surreal vocal line that echoes through the song. As the song gradually progresses adding percussion, the soul of the music really comes out.
Do you want to see whats inside my head? brings back the atmospheric textures and the electronic background to what seems like a riser that keeps you on your toes.
The album's narrative takes an interesting turn with Do Humans Dream of Electric Sheep?, a track that captures a dystopian world with its electronic ambiance and atmospheric textures. Dark and majestic and cinematic, it is one of the album's most sweeping and enveloping moments.
In the song, The World You Grew Up In No Longer Exists, FHMY grapples with depression, nostalgia, masculinity, and loneliness in raw, unvarnished terms. The album seems to exist as a trip through a shattered recollection, each song layering on top of the previous, fleshing out its broad, complicated story. Production is stellar, imbuing a polished sense of clarity without ever feeling too tidy—like seeing something familiar through muddied glass.
The album's closer approaches as The World Is Not a Beautiful Place & I Am Afraid to Die takes off in a stunning fashion. From a solitary, sorrowful guitar line, it swells on heartbreak narration and soaring instrumental work, finally cresting and then leaving the listener in an uncomfortable silence—a beautiful representation of the album's emotional heft.
At its essence, this album is a search for identity in an ever-more foreign world. It is an avant-garde sound experiment, weaving individual experience and universal feeling into a cohesive work, and the most ambitious thing FHMY has ever attempted. For those willing to dive in, The World You Grew Up In No Longer Exists is an experience one will not soon forget—one that resonates long after the last note has stopped ringing.
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