Review: SYML crushed beneath the weight of time with ‘Nobody Lives Here’

When the instrumental track “A100” descends upon the eardrums, it’s like a rush of water cascading over your body. It’s soothing and replenishing, a necessary salve to this troubled world. All you want to do is hide away and get lost in its velvety comfort. As the primer for SYML‘s new album, Nobody Lives Here, it prepares the listener for a silky listening experience. But it’s not until “Carry No Thing” that you witness an artist blooming and expressing a deep probing of human existence. There’s something raw about SYML’s performance here that whisks you away, taking you to a foreign land where the bad washes away and all you’re left with is love and kindness.

“This healthy fear of losing keeps me from feeling foolish,” he sings, snapping the melody in two on “Careful.” The fear of success, of failure, of not being good enough, of languishing in the deep end seems to puncture the air from SYML’s lungs. But he uses that wound to propel him forward, leaping from melody to melody with the agility of a bunny rabbit. Make no mistake, there’s no rush as the album unravels methodically out of his hands. His lyrics are pins in a pin cushion, prickly and blood-inducing. It’s almost sacred in the way he’s built the album around time’s merciless hand. “Time, wait up for me,” he laments with “Please Slow Down.” That urgency and desperation to hang onto every ephemeral moment drives him practically mad. He’s mad – but never delusional. He simply expresses every faded emotion that’s swollen up inside of him.

The album’s muted cohesion keeps the audience baited, like a trout forcefully bucking against a very thin wire. “Bury my heart when the lights go down,” he sings, a fresh flood of tears rolling down his cheeks. These admissions dance on the skin, as though rays of light filtered through the brutal sorrow of existence. With every lyric and hum of the heartbeat, SYML reveals all he possibly can across 11 songs. You may even collapse underneath its tremendous emotional weight. “Heavy Hearts” finds him “floating out to sea,” learning that he only has himself to save, with “Heartbreakdown” depicts a harrowing heartbreak that he never saw coming. These moments in life might be fleeting, yet they are compounded through the hourglass.

SYML’s Nobody Lives Here is his magnum opus. He scrawls out these confessions as a way to exorcise the demons rattling in his bones. There’s no avoiding it once you hit play. He hypnotizes you into going along for the ride, even through a waterfall of sadness or anger. He stands his ground, owning his feelings, and that’s what’s most exemplary – that he’s willing to be so vulnerable on record. It’s guaranteed to make you think, at least, and maybe cry with a bottle of wine on the bathroom floor.

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