Ambition is a dangerous word in music. Usually, it’s a polite synonym for “bloated” or “overlong,” reserved for when a band decides that what the world really needs is their 80-minute prog rock double album where each track is a metaphor for different kinds of soup. But with When I Close My Eyes, Boy Grapes proves that ambition doesn’t have to mean self-indulgence. Sometimes it just means being unafraid to make choices that could fail.
This is what I think makes the album so interesting: it’s not afraid of looking messy. Too often, we get albums that are so thoroughly sanded down, so perfectly engineered for “playlistability,” that they might as well have been assembled by IKEA. Everything’s in the right place, sure, but it feels soulless; the musical equivalent of a showroom kitchen. Boy Grapes, by contrast, doesn’t present himself as some godlike producer carefully sculpting a perfect marble statue of a record. He’s not polishing flaws out of existence; he’s showing you the cracks and saying, these are part of it too.
Boy Grapes embraces jagged edges, contradictions, and sudden left turns into entirely different genres. It’s not just that he switches gears; it’s that he does it without asking permission. One moment you’re floating in acoustic dream-folk, lulled into a trance, and the next you’re being bludgeoned by industrial percussion. It feels lived in. The genre-hopping doesn’t read as Boy Grapes trying on costumes; it reads as someone opening a very cluttered wardrobe and showing all of the clothes fit him fine. The messiness isn’t sloppy, it’s intentional; a reflection of the fact that human emotion is messy, identity is messy, and trying to smooth all that out for the sake of cohesion would be dishonest. What’s compelling isn’t that Boy Grapes can move from folk to punk to metal to industrial; it’s that when he does, it feels necessary. Each detour reflects a different facet of the same internal storm. The roughness of the transitions, the refusal to make it seamless, is the point.
The album opens with “Sand,” which is less a song than a trance-state. Acoustic guitar, simple, looping chords, and the sensation that someone’s inviting you into their head. It’s intimate but unsettling, like the moment in a dream when you realize you’re in a dream. It’s heavy material, but presented with such delicate restraint that it feels like Boy Grapes whispering secrets through the keyhole.
Then, immediately, the keyhole explodes. “Just Move” is a punky, fast, scrappy track that sounds like Boy Grapes is exorcising every demon in under three minutes. The guitars are jagged, the drums relentless, and the vocals sound like they were recorded in one take at maximum volume because if he stopped to breathe, the whole thing would collapse. And you know what? It rules. The placement is perfect: from ethereal calm into pure chaos.
The album thrives on these swings. Take “Muscular Atrophy,” which is built around a hypnotic bassline that creeps under your skin like a migraine aura. It’s slow, it’s heavy, and it doesn’t release its grip. The lyrics use physical decay as a metaphor for psychological stagnation; you’re alive, but barely moving. And just when you’re lulled into this bleak groove, along comes “Bobby.” Imagine if Nine Inch Nails were less interested in polish and more interested in kicking over bins outside your apartment at 3 a.m. Distorted percussion, metallic guitars, vocals that sound like they’re daring you to flinch. It’s the kind of track that doesn’t care if you enjoy it; it cares if you feel cornered by it. And it works. It’s frustrating in the best way, because it prepares you for the closer: “Better Time.” And oh boy, what a closer. It’s sprawling, it’s dramatic, it shifts gears multiple times like a short film in song form. Spoken-word passages give way to massive walls of sound, fragility crumbles into ferocity, and the whole thing ends not with triumph but with longing: the hope that things will improve, but the acknowledgement that they might not. It’s not closure. It’s honesty.
Here’s the thing about When I Close My Eyes by Boy Grapes: it’s contradictory, messy, abrasive, and occasionally exhausting. But it’s also one of the most genuinely compelling records I’ve heard from an indie artist in years. Too many albums chase polish and coherence, sanding off the rough edges until you’re left with something listenable but lifeless. Boy Grapes does the opposite. He leans into the cracks, the tonal shifts, the refusal to fit neatly into a genre box.
It’s not an album for everyone, and thank God for that. Music this personal shouldn’t be engineered to satisfy everyone. Instead, it feels like Boy Grapes making exactly the record he needed to make, whether or not it’s convenient, comfortable, or even marketable.
So no, this isn’t “ambitious” in the way us critics usually mean it. It’s ambitious in the sense that it dares you to follow it into the highs, lows, and weird, liminal in-betweens of its world. And if you’re willing to meet it there, you’ll come away shaken, maybe a little confused, but absolutely glad you went along for the ride.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
