FHMY makes his debut with “The World You Grew Up In No Longer Exists”. A bold and largely experimental album with heavy themes that pass the torch to one another to tell a linear story starting from the bright nostalgia of childhood all the way to the unfathomable darkness of suicidal thoughts and difficulties of mental illness.
“Egyptian Football” immediately makes a nod to American Football (the Midwest emo band); FHMY is wearing his influences on his sleeves. The track is a blend of math rock elements and ambient music elements, where the guitar layers stack like distant memories you can almost touch but never quite hold onto. There’s a bittersweet nostalgia here, and it spills straight into the next track, “memoriesyouwillneverfeelagain.” Its shifting time signatures analogize the push and pull between standing on your own and needing someone else. This song also introduces us to some cool extended spoken word samples in its outro. It drops in Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem from “Mirror,” setting the stage for the album’s introspective journey.
Things take a turn with “You Can’t Live There Forever,” an electronic interlude that feels surreal. With its impossible to play rhythms and drone based harmony, it stretches the definition of psychedelic music. In contrast, going back to regular math rock/jazz territory with “Chery! Oh Chery!” almost feels like normal, non-complicated music. That is, until it reaches the halfway point and goes full shoegaze with almost noir jazz-inspired chords. It’s a dreamy texture that leaves you to your imagination whilst probing it slightly.
The real soul of the album, however, is when FHMY teams up with AQL, starting with “my blue heaven.” Two Cairo musicians find common ground in the isolation of the suburbs. The shoegaze sound wraps you up; it manages to feel warm and hazy yet cold at the same time. It sounds like loss and grief enveloped in a fire spawned by heartache. Its intensity is overwhelming, so thankfully, “The World You Grew Up in, No Longer Exists” steps in right after; it’s an instrumental that gives you space to breathe and reflect, letting you fill in the blanks with your own memories and meaning.
“I Keep On Not Dying” does an interesting take on Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and flips it on its head: the artist wakes up, not as a bug, but as himself, stuck in a loop of creating and recreating, all fueled by the chaos around him. This song features a second poem, this time it’s from Neon Genesis Evangelion. We are shifting more towards the noise rock part of the album now with “Do you want to see the noise inside my head?” rips away any filters, throwing you straight into the raw, unfiltered noise of mental struggle, which is admittedly a bit hard to follow, but then as you probably know “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”.
The album concludes with “The World is not a Beautiful Place & I am afraid to die,” FHMY and AQL take us to our destination. We started at the cautious, melancholia-laced nostalgia of “Egyptian Football” but all hope was lost on our way here. It’s pure despair: “No one is coming”.
