Lindsay's Introduction:
Here we are in Summer Sucks, the album which took forever to finish. As Sunsetters’ first rock opera, it was always going to be a big deal both in universe and out, which meant that the music would have to be worthy of such status. This, of course, meant that we would have to be meticulous. To this end, we decided that Jordan would take the lead on creating the album, a process which, much like with perfecting ‘Deep Cuts’ in Ancestor, involved Jordan taking what I had written previously and making it all way fucking cooler. Except this time we needed a lot more material, which was a large part of why this album took so long to write, really.

As you might recall, the concept for Summer Sucks has existed for five or so years by now, though in the beginning it was really quite different from what it is now. I wrote a more-or-less complete first draft based on that concept, but we decided, as Jordan reworked the concept into something better, that we would also rework the music and lyrics and whatnot to go along with the changes to the story.

The final album draws a lot of musical bits from the first draft, but is written in such a way that those parts would be unrecognisable when compared to the first draft. Which is why this version is better than the first one.

God, it still hasn’t really sunk in that we actually finished the album.

Jordan's Introduction:
The Mythology of Empathy welcomed us to the new fiction: Synthetic rock, synthetic musicians, synthetic record companies, synthetic magazine articles, promises of an entire fictional discography.

The second album in the saga of the Sunsetters, Summer Sucks, has other goals. It must:

1. Be a rock opera / epic poem / single narrative.
2. Take elements of Mythology as the base for a more refined listening experience.
3. Follow certain essential “parallels” shared between OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING and Topography Genera.
4. Still sound like a cool and plausible album from start to finish.

Considering the album would have to be a mega-long complex of intricate composition balanced alongside a mythological monomyth, that premise definitely sounds like a tall order. To blur the lines between “rock album” and “symphony,” leaning too far neither on one side nor the other, that’s something rock bands don’t do (beyond lip service), so what makes us think a couple of 20-somethings living an ocean apart could produce something like that from scratch? Simple. We didn’t think we’d finish the first album either.

Enjoy.

Lindsay:
‘The Inferno Begins’ is a song that has existed since the first draft of Summer Sucks started back in, like, 2013. It was originally seven-or-so minutes, and was the midpoint of the album. The original version was very blatantly inspired by/a rip-off of Bathory’s ‘A Fine Day to Die’, with secondary influence from Lord Belial’s ‘Armageddon Revelation’. Narratively, as the centre of the album, the original ‘Inferno’ was the point where the story took its dark turn, so the music was supposed to be heavier than the songs that came before it; hence, overt black metal influence.

When the original Summer Sucks got scrapped, this was the only song to more-or-less entirely make it into the new version, though with added elements from some of the other old songs. ‘Inferno’ was the first song of the new album to be completed, and has pretty much existed in its current form since 2015, small edits notwithstanding. Several elements of the old album’s concept that both Jordan and I liked were added to ‘Inferno’, including the upbeat, pop punk-ish intro section (intended to be the opening track); the ballad section that follows the black metal section (intended to be the track before ‘Inferno’ and is still intact as its own song, and might see a release as a single or something); and the last section (intended to be the final track of the album), among others.

I’m honestly impressed that this song came together as fast as it did, and me being generally impressed with this album will likely be a recurring theme of this commentary; these five songs very likely are the best material Jordan and I have written yet, and will set the bar perhaps unreasonably high for material to come.

I also like the joke of this album starting the exact same way as Mythology, with an upbeat punk-influenced bit. As we might have mentioned in the commentary for that album, what became the opening for this track was originally intended for that album, and what became ‘Drowning Under the Influence’ was originally intended to be the title track for the first draft of this album. Was this needlessly complicated, in hindsight? Probably, but it’s still funny to think about.

Jordan:
Inferno introduces us to the Summer Sucks war machine, throwing so many things your way and at times testing your endurance all in order to demonstrate that this isn’t your dad’s rock and roll anymore. The Sunsetters are, to music, what Finnegans Wake’s engineering was to language. But it doesn’t drop us into that right away-- first it has to let the midi rock play out a little bit, allow the reactionary cynic in all of us to pop his head and ask “oh, is this more of the same, more Mythology?” The Sunsetters collectively say “Fuck you,” and they do so through their “instruments.” All of this goes on adjacent to a parallel battle: We’re here in real life pretending the Sunsetters are a real band, talking as if this is the case, and indulging in this while reactionary cynics prepare to dismiss us for it. These are to be framed as battles, with the album as a closed system, an engine of nothing more than rock and roll ideas, generating models of fiction one can live within.

Incidentally, I functioned as this song’s arranger. I put the sections in the right places and made edits to heighten the flow. I also wrote the vocals. I will not discuss lyrics, I will say that right now. Someday, but not today.

Lindsay:
‘Pig Bruiser’ is the song that took the longest to actually complete, I feel. It and ‘Tired Anthem’ together are the reasons why this album took five years to write, really. I have a bit less to say about ‘Pig’ since it was almost entirely Jordan who wrote it. In fact, in terms of writing the album, I would say that the bulk of material that I wrote went into ‘Inferno’ and ‘Found the Fountain of Mab’, and perhaps also ‘Tired Anthem’.

As far as I can tell, very little, if any, material from the old Summer Sucks went into this song. No, this song pulled instead from other unreleased material; for example, the Darkest Clowns riff came from an unfinished draft of a song called ‘Railroad to Metropolis’, which has a second draft started, but is, like the first one, nowhere near completion.

Jordan:
What a journey this song has gone through. The last song to be written (though fragments like God Machine, Darkest Clowns, and Deeper have endured since near the beginning), this has gone through at least three major revisions. First it was just a bunch of fragments, then it was a bunch of fragments with a very slow second half (the Pig King was born here, with a sinister ballad in 15/16 that has been transformed in the final product), then it was rewritten from scratch to have a more hardcore first half (which the final product still takes as root), and then all of it was rewritten from scratch one more time when the rest of the album was further along. For all of Summer Sucks’s development, this song did not functionally exist, but for the last month when I just kinda... made it happen.

So what’s the “idea” behind this song? After the primarily metal Inferno, I had it set in my mind that track 2 should instead revolve around a structure influenced by the conventions of electronica. The strained development history probably stems from attempts to mimic the sound of electronic music, but that never felt right in the context of the rest of the album. Eventually I realized the sound should be scrapped; so long as the structure takes after the genre, the bouncy continuous medley effect would still come across. Beyond that, as Pig Bruiser corresponds with Rapture’s second act (and Genera’s second movement), Pig Bruiser must give more of a focus to the antagonists as a general ensemble. In practice this requirement led me between hard rock and opera. (If you’re interested in gaining insight on the concepts behind the lyrics, I recommend looking up Canio, and his relevance to Pierrot.) Then the final piece of the puzzle in tying this song into a cohesive whole turned out to be MOTHER 3. Lucius and the fall of the Pig King, sounds familiar to anyone who’s played that masterpiece of a game.

It’s weird. All this time, I’d assumed this song would develop to sound like some massive angsty Nine Inch Nails song. That’s why the title had a bruised skin motif (pig bruise!). It, uh, it didn’t end up that way.

Lindsay:
‘Found the Fountain of Mab’ is a song that has, like ‘Inferno’, existed for a long time. Though it wasn’t finished for as long ‘Inferno’ was, the material that had existed had been polished enough to appear at the end of The Mythology of Empathy (v2) as a bonus track. It has since been expanded well beyond what it was when it first saw the light of day.

I love this song a whole lot. The beginning section and its reprise are some of the most explicitly beautiful material on the album, along with the first few sections of ‘Tired Anthem’. They demonstrate a versatility in songwriting that was missing from the first version of the album, a growing maturity as writers that was, simply, impossible for 2016 Linz and Jordan to achieve.

In a way, ‘Fountain’ was our coming-of-age as writers, and I think it is so in the best way possible, even moreso than us actually finishing the album, really. I say so because, while Summer Sucks was a long time coming, it would not have been possible for us to finish it without first growing as writers. This might sound obvious, but it bears mentioning because, for a time, I was to some extent worried that we might not ever finish the album. Though, that said, I probably wouldn’t have regretted never finishing because ‘Inferno’, ‘Fountain’, and the first fifteen-or-so minutes of ‘Anthem’ were strong enough that, even unfinished, I could be proud of them.

All that said, I am, of course, glad the album got finished.

. . . also, now is a good time to mention that, while all of the final lyrics were written by Jordan, I had had a go at writing them in, like, 2016. Fragments remain of mine here-and-there, but that’s about it, really. I bring it up because my attempt at ‘Fountain’ was actually pretty good and has been poached for My Amontillado (remember them? They did ‘At Least We Have Each Other’ back in the day. Never stopped writing material for them, something might be coming for them sometime soon, maybe).

And thus we come to the end of disc one of Summer Sucks. Up next, of course, is disc two.

Jordan:
Fountain had to be the staggeringly pretty one, the emotional low point, the climax in a classical sense, a midpoint extreme featuring behaviour and passages which exist only in this section and do not come up again. I have no idea how or why Lindsay came up with the acoustic guitar opening passage, but it was the first thing to be written for this song (it predated anything from Pig Bruiser), and it nailed the tone. I didn’t dare touch it. When I finally did, years later, I found I suddenly and inexplicably understood harmonies-- I added all the stuff that wasn't guitar.

My pride, though, my pride is the tarantella in movement two. The Egg Dance, I call it privately (I can easily imagine a grotesque Dr. Eggman dancing along to the sinister beat). The root arpeggio is Lindsay's (it's basically The Arpeggio of the album), but I added all the trappings, all the rhythms, that big booming countermelody ("when, how?"). I can say the tarantella is the cornerstone of the plot, a crucial symbol. Its presence in this song is a necessity.

Lindsay:
As I mentioned while talking about ‘Fountain’, the first fifteen-or-so minutes of this song have existed in a polished state since, like, 2017-18, and were some of the most beautiful material that had been written for the album. The joke of this song, of course, is that it’s a thirty-four minute song that comes after two fifteen minute songs and a twenty minute song. Hence the name ‘Tired Anthem’; the listener is supposed to be tired by the time this song starts. The effect might be somewhat weakened on a CD release of the album because this song is on the second disc, with the first ending with ‘Fountain’, but the effect remains fully intact through digital, which is good.

This is the song that has the most of my lyrical contributions in it, I’m pretty sure. That isn’t to say there’s a lot of my lyrics in it, but the general structure of the lyrics is to some extent derived from my old one, if expanded.

Does this song hold up as the culmination of everything in this album? Probably, yeah. Is it tiring to listen to it after listening to the first three songs all in one go? Definitely, yeah. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

Jordan:
I find it exhausting to watch movies, to read books, to play through a video game, even to listen to an album all the way through. I understand, though, that that feeling of tiredness is relative to my own body; attention is relative and can be trained. I consider it the ultimate test of integrity, whether for the piece of media or for myself, if I can stay engaged through my own restlessness. It can be argued that on the other side of that intimidating wall of restless potential boredom is a personally fulfilling meditative state. I certainly believe in this, so long as the activity being pursued is one you are doing volitionally.

It can also be argued, following the former, that this makes tiredness and boredom proportional to awe. Awe, as I have come to understand it, is the sensation that cuts through your doubts and brings you to take in as much information as possible. It is traditionally associated with bolts of lightning, with the relentlessness of nature, with works of such complexity as the Bible. Now, this song is not the Bible; that can be demonstrated. But it is ambitious, mysterious, and, I hope, beautiful. We were going for "awesome" in the same sense that a high schooler might think of a classic metal album he hasn't heard, we were going for a song that reaches for the potential we would often imagine rock as having. In order to do that, we had to try and summon some genuine awe.

Tired Anthem, at 34 minutes, is the longest song we've written. It's also pretty diverse, with ten movements pulling from different styles. Movements 1, 3, and 5 were drafted earliest. Movement 2 is another of those passages I'm really proud of. Movement 4 is Lindsay and I working in tandem for a peaceful synthesis. The latter half of the song took a lot of forethought, and I'm stll too close to it to give meaningful commentary. But, uh, there was a lot of prog, and I still love “The Last Sunset.”

Lindsay:
I pretty much had nothing to do with this song, really, in every draft of it. The most I contributed to it, like with ‘Pig Bruiser’, is that Jordan based it on bits that I had written before. This means that I can look at it with an ever-so-slightly less biased opinion of it.

My ever-so-slightly less biased opinion of it is: It’s a killer song. Especially the last movement. That part has always been the highlight of the song for me, and it’s been the part of the song that has been consistent with every draft, as I recall. It was always really good, but the drum freak out in it that got added in the last draft makes it even better.

It’s probably the perfect closer for this album, being the only song under ten minutes (which is part of the overall joke of the album).

Thus we come to the end of disc two of Summer Sucks. Up next, of course, is disc three.

Jordan:
I will go ahead and kill some mystery by saying this song contains a rendition of the Float Islands music from the Kirby series. I don't remember the original reason I had for seeking a Sunsetters cover of that, but I do remember the sound was very different than I had expected; it brought a strange tone of crushing finality. The decision to include it in the Summer Sucks finale has more to do with that tone than with any relevance to Kirby, but I also.. I dunno, I have no problem paying a tribute to Kirby here. Interpret that however you want.

So, Clowns. The skeleton for this song was written many years ago, and while the final version is a from-scratch rewrite (with a new post-rock first half that was originally twice as long before Lindsay reminded me this song was supposed to be under ten minutes), the general structure remains. Here we see some final reprisals of motifs from across the album as the sound progresses into the only resting place that felt appropriate: An energetic fade-out. The Summer Sucks machine never stops; we just stop listening.

There's a new world out there. Lucius may be condemned to dance forever, but at least he'll watch over us and make sure the Clowns are still delivering the sun safely on its course across our sky. What will this new summer hold for you?