Here’s the thing: not every album is meant to slap. Not every record is supposed to bang, vibe, or soundtrack a latte-fueled morning walk in a recycled outfit. Some albums exist to sit with you when things don’t make sense. Permanent Solution for a Temporary Problem, the latest by Sjelløs, is one of those. It’s 22 tracks long, which is already absurd in an age where most pop acts treat tracklists like TikToks; brief, punchy, algorithmic offerings to the attention gods. But this is not an album that asks for your time. Rather, it quietly assumes you’ve already run out of other places to be.
Lyrically, Sjelløs walks a tightrope between poetic ambiguity and uncomfortable specificity. The titles alone, with examples like “My Name Doesn’t Sound Like Me Anymore” and “You Glitched When I Needed You Most;” they tell you more about this album’s emotional state than any Genius annotation ever could. These aren’t just songs. They’re snapshots of moments you thought no one else had.
Sonically, Sjelløs keeps things quiet, lo-fi, glitchy, and occasionally gorgeous, with indietronica flourishes showing up in the shimmery pads, disintegrating drum loops, and field recordings that drift through the mix like intrusive thoughts. Production-wise, it stays committed to its mood: ambient fog wrapped around lo-fi imperfections, where synths shimmer but never dazzle and beats pulse without ever quite dropping. Everything sounds a bit off-center, like it’s coming through an old radio inside a dream. It’s the sonic equivalent of being emotionally present but not entirely there. Imagine if a meditation app had an existential crisis mid-session and started quietly leaking your trauma back to you in waves.
The album begins, appropriately, with “I Ghosted Myself.” This track doesn’t slap. It doesn’t bop. It lingers. Sjelløs doesn’t deliver vocals so much as they leak them, like they’re narrating a dream in real time and unsure if anyone’s listening. And yet, this intro is weirdly magnetic. Not in a “let’s replay this 10 times” way, but in a “I’m going to think about this line in the shower tomorrow” kind of way. It’s a slow dissolve into numbness; less of a song and more of a status update: currently evaporating.
Then there’s “Was I Real or Just Well Written,” a track that reads like a diss aimed directly at your curated online persona. The title alone deserves its own podcast. Here, Sjelløs confronts the exhausting project of performing your identity for others, whether online or IRL, until the performance becomes the only thing left. It’s existential dread set to a softly glitching metronome.
From there, we sink deeper into what is effectively a sonic diary of mental illness. “I Was Just Background Noise” feels like a lo-fi epiphany; like the moment you realize your existence hasn’t been as visible to others as you thought. It’s not melodramatic. It’s just… true. The production is minimal, like it’s afraid to interrupt your thoughts. And that’s kind of the whole aesthetic of this album, not to dominate your attention, but to gently accompany your self-doubt. Then there’s “My Name Doesn’t Sound Like Me Anymore,” which might be the best title in recent memory. It’s short, eerie, and disarmingly sad. If you’ve ever heard your own name said out loud and felt weird about it, this one will hit like a mirror you didn’t ask to look into.
The album does offer brief moments of levity, or at least distortion. “You Glitched When I Needed You Most” leans into digital aesthetics, with warped vocals and stuttering rhythms mimicking a conversation breaking down in real time. It’s clever, but still heavy… like if the lovechild of Aphex Twin and Clairo decided to make a therapy tape for robots.
And finally, we land at “Permanent Solution for a Temporary Problem.” It’s not a climax; this album isn’t interested in catharsis for the sake of structure, but it is the moment where everything crystallizes. The track explodes into what I can only be describe as if Porter Robinson’s “Years of War” had a nervous breakdown halfway through Happier Than Ever, then wandered face-first into Poppy’s Concrete. Yes, there’s a full metalcore scream breakdown, and yes, it somehow works. The screamo vocals don’t come across as a genre pivot; they sound like the inevitable conclusion to all that soft dissociation. Like, of course it was leading here. Of course it ends in a scream.
The whole album plays like it’s streaming from a forgotten browser tab; intimate, a little corrupted, and always one click away from vanishing. There’s a fragile tension to it, like something held together by tape and memory. Even at its prettiest, it sounds like it might fall apart mid-note. But that’s the point. On Permanent Solution for a Temporary Problem, Sjelløs has crafted a world where the glitches are the message and the buffering is the feeling. You don’t just listen to Permanent Solution for a Temporary Problem; you haunt it, and it haunts you back.
Follow Sjelløs
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.
