Now Arriving At Panic Station is out now!
Image: Supplied.
Kitschen Boy have shared their new EP, Now Arriving At Panic Station. To celebrate the release, the band are taking us through the collection of songs track-by-track.
Now Arriving at Panic Station is for me a chronology of a time in my life that required significant self reflection in order to make some pivotal life decisions. It’s about letting my friends down, letting myself down and breaking up with a partner but it’s also about rebuilding what I let myself tear down and allowing myself the space to be self critical but also improve on the things I chastise myself for. To ensure this story makes sense however, the EP has to be listened to in a different order to what we decided was the most sonically pleasing. So it goes:
HAPPY PLACE
Our story begins in the midst of a panic attack, I’m on a night out with my partner and things have come tumbling down. It speaks of the frustrations of just trying to enjoy ourselves and ending up in a state where I’m here trying my best to do breath work, willing myself to come down to earth and pull out of this flat spin. While the chorus sarcastically chants how fed up I am to have to be in my internal happy place, the verses reason with myself and my partner that I don’t think we’re really going to be able to recover from this upset and pull our night back together.
THE PERFECT EXCUSE
We continue through the story to a major low point for me. I've started to become resigned in my attempts to reach out to friends or follow through with plans and I’m beginning to notice just how frequently I’m using my mental health as an excuse to wriggle out of plans and flake on people. This track is an inward facing facetious dig at my decision making and my inability to follow through with what I told myself I’d do, further pushing myself deeper into this miserable little hole I’ve found myself in.
SKYLINE
The middle point of this timeline is Skyline, a track in the depths of a depressive slump where I've decided that my presence in my partner’s life is blight on her happiness. This song speaks about a night ice skating in the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, looking over the city on a winter evening and thinking that perhaps she’d be happier if we hadn’t given this relationship another go.
THE VACUUM
This is where I start to really think about where this attitude and these decisions have left me. The Vacuum is an inner monologue of the realisation that my life becoming more mundane and lonely than I ever would have wanted is a result of pushing people away for to fear of being uncomfortable; that if I want to improve things, make friends, be in love or have new experiences I’m going to have to push myself into doing and saying things that might not be easy for me.
A NEW HOPE
The final crescendo of our journey is a song about waking up and turning it all around; not letting go of hope and making change for the better. A New Hope is all about realising how boring it is to be so bogged down and that no matter how bad things get in my head I’m not going to release the light and excitement I have for experiencing life. In this track I’m deciding that I’m going to rewrite the script; I’ll try and convince my partner to try again, I’ll make an effort to change the little things in my life that weigh me down far greater than they should and I’ll try to be convinced that I’ve earned the space to be kind to myself for once. Our story ends with the sentiment that it’s time for me to just do all the silly little things I need to do and find all the small ways I can just make living easier, starting from the ground up and working towards a better head space in the hopes that the bigger things will follow suit in time.
Now Arriving At Panic Station is out now!