Imagine you wake up one day and everything around you is just slightly off. The buildings are the same, but they feel unfamiliar. Your childhood home is still standing, but it no longer feels like it belongs to you. You look in the mirror, and the person staring back is almost you… but not quite. Things feel like a blur and you have to squint, but it feels nice when you do.
That’s what listening to The World You Grew Up in No Longer Exists feels like.
The World You Grew Up in No Longer Exists by FHMY is a release that I’ve learned to love with more and more listens. FHMY has crafted something that is both deeply personal and unsettlingly universal. This is not an album that simply invites you in. It loves you giving it your time, but the moment you press play, you realize that you’re somewhere you recognize, even if you don’t want to. It’s part Midwest emo, part post-rock, part-experimental rock and is overall a deeply introspective album that somehow manages to be both painfully intimate and cosmically vast at the same time.
Thematically, it tackles stuff like nostalgia, depression, dysmorphia, masculinity, and isolation with a comfortably numb form of honesty that makes it impossible to just throw on in the background and go about your day. Sonically, it’s a dizzying cocktail of math rock, post-rock, emo, shoegaze, and electronic experimentation. If you’re familiar with Quadeca, The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die and American Football, you would have a pretty good idea of what you’re getting into here. Ethereal synth washes, intricate math-rock guitar lines and soundscapes both performed and sampled that feel like a desperate text you were too afraid to send or a random memory that makes you sad because the thought popped into your head when it wasn’t something you even thought to remember in the first place. However, what makes The World You Grew Up in No Longer Exists more than just a well-executed homage is how seamlessly it blends these elements together into something that feels both nostalgic and fresh.
The production is gorgeous, in a way that feels polished or comforting until you notice something amiss, but can’t quite place where. Guitars and synths twist and tangle in intricate math rock patterns before dissolving into reverb-heavy shoegaze haze. One moment, you’re floating through an ethereal dreamscape of hushed vocals and ambient synths only to find yourself onto another track wherein you’re hit with crushing percussion and guitar riffs and progressions that feel like each emotion one could possibly feel is being wrung out with each strum. It’s this constant push-and-pull between beauty and chaos, clarity and distortion because when things come right down to it, nothing about navigating your own identity in a world that no longer makes sense is going to sound like pure bliss, but finding reasons to try to do so nonetheless is a beauty in of itself.
There are tracks that feel like they exist purely to lull you into a false sense of security before completely ripping the floor out from under you. Others lean so hard into shoegaze melancholy that you might physically feel your soul leaving your body. And then there are moments of pure, avant-garde weirdness—glitchy production, reversed samples, vocals buried so deep in the mix they barely sound human—that make you question whether you’re still listening to an album or if you somehow slipped into another dimension.
Personal highlights include “You Can’t Live There Forever”, which is a brilliant fusion of everything the album does well, moving between delicate, The Avalanches-esque sample play over massive, post-rock progressions to be followed by the next track, “Chery! Oh Chery!” which is a full math rock delight of the highest of delights. Lastly, the charmingly titled “The World Is Not a Beautiful Place & I Am Afraid to Die” (in reference to the band) is an excellent closer that builds slowly from a lone guitar line paired with heart-wrenching storytelling as reverb-drenched arpeggios keep crescendo-ing to an unresolved note, leaving the track in a reflective silence.
At the end of the day, The World You Grew Up in No Longer Exists is feelings incarnate. This album is the sound of someone trying to make sense of themselves in a world that doesn’t make sense anymore and getting both closer and farther with every push and pull. It’s a deeply, achingly honest release that comes together like existential dread wrapped in a warm blanket. I cannot praise this project enough.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
