TSR by The Smoking Room

This album is dedicated to all my friends, some of my family and anyone who has felt down & out but kept on swinging. Inspired by loneliness, nerve damage, weed, pro wrestling, spirituality, tinnitus, the commodification of art, lucid dreaming and suicidal thoughts.

Had so much fun recording/mixing this and as always Emiliano absolutely killed it on all of the drum tracks. Doing the gapless thing again for most of the tracks, so try to avoid the perils of shuffle. If you're streaming, please turn off normalised audio volume or just download from here for the best experience. Listen with headphones too if you really wanna make me smile.

I feel like a beg anytime I try to write about my music and in the same way that I've written a hundred texts to my friends when I feel lonely, only to feel a bit pathetic and delete the messages without sending, I've drafted this a stupid amount of times and I still have no idea what I want to say. Trying to promote my music always feels like a necessary evil and even doing these few paragraphs feels daunting. I don't want to engage with stupid social media marketing and try to distill my art down to it's most digestible form so I can spam the fuck out of it on apps I don't care about trying to impress people I don't know. Fuck that. Generally, I've been trying to shed my overwhelming need for validation for a while now, so at this stage begging people to listen to my music really goes against all of that. If you care enough to listen, know that I appreciate it a lot and I hope you like it.

I know it's not always easy hearing me sing about the kind of things I sing about and that my lyrics are morbid more often than not. All I can say is that for better or worse, I need to be honest about how I'm feeling in order to survive. Writing a song is always gonna be easier for me than telling you how I'm feeling in the real world. If I didn't have this outlet I'd be dead, so regardless of how you feel about it, please do try and understand that this is all I have. I'll freely admit that I put too much pressure on myself, striving to make art that feels 'good enough', to fill a void that can never be filled in some ridiculous vicious cycle and the stupid part is, I'm trying to impress a world that I don't even want to be a part of. Lately I often find myself questioning, is it better to be your true, authentic self, or to be loved? Is it better to be honest about how fucking much I want to die or should I save you all the discomfort of hearing me whinge about it? Living for other people is exhausting, but I'm gonna do it for a little bit longer.

For what it's worth, I have had tremendous fun writing and recording this album, several days where I felt on the top of the world just for being able to turn my negative emotions into a song that I was proud of. I hope that some of the passion for the music comes through when you listen, despite the depressing subject matter.

I think that about sums it up. Maybe I'll see some of you at an open mic or something in the near future. Once again, thanks for listening/reading/caring, it means a lot. love you all. TSR forever xxxxxxxxxxxxx

this shit makes me so happy

Facebook