Music has a way of pushing emotions to the surface, and not solely for those that listen to it. Maybe even more so for the creators, it can echo both the blissful moments and the struggles, giving power, meaning, contrast and definition to the story it shares. Narrating the highs and lows is what makes music so innately captivating, and ‘Ouroboros’, the debut album of L.A.’s Grunge House guru Saint Punk, offers all that in spades.
Reflective of the war of human emotion raging within, ‘Ouroboros’ has no end or beginning. Through tracks such as ‘Closer Tonight’, MXMS collab ‘Ghost Blood’ and ‘Watch Me As I Dance’ (with Yung Tory), the fourteen-track album pushes listeners over, through and past peaks and valleys of confusion, euphoria, excitement and depression, channeling a raw emotional force that flows back into itself and has listeners coming back for more time and time again. Through it all, the contrasting sentiments of the fourteen tracks form a perpetual cycle where input means output and the other way around. And if that’s not the equivalent of infinite replay value, nothing is.
“The ouroboros to me represents a neverending cycle”, Saint Punk says. “Writing this album felt like Groundhog Day, waking up only to repeat the same events the day before. Some time has passed since I’ve written these songs though and the ouroboros also has come to represent new life for me. That’s how I choose to see it now. A neverending force of momentum, pushing and pulling, grinding against the grain, to be born into something worthy of the effort. Something with purpose. It’s everything I experienced and felt in 2020, from anger to sadness to euphoria, depression and more. It’s basically a journal put to music.”