Just wanted to add a little forward to this. I wrote this article back in May of 2025, but for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to put the finishing touches on it and publish. I was super excited for this one, and enthralled with this album. I’m just finally getting around to publishing this now, but I hope that anyone who reads this gets to see how much I love this album and how much it meant to me last year. I hope you also take the time to listen to this album and think about what it means to you. These guys are fantastic musicians and songwriters, and they recently announced a European tour supporting Between The Buried and Me, which is huge for them. I hope they gain some mainstream success and get a reward for the beautiful art they’ve created. Anyway, here it is:
I’m here today to discuss the new album from You Win Again Gravity, a band making their sophomore appearance on my site, with their first appearance being a small article about one of their singles from a few years ago. Back then I hadn’t really settled into my style with these articles, and I think a lot of what I said in it felt so structured and formulaic. Which is why I knew I had to write a new article when their album, Don’t Leave Me Here, Pt. 1, dropped a few weeks ago. In fact, I had already started drafting an article when they released one of the singles for the album, called Heartwood. I was enamored with that song when it released, to the point where I would actually press the infinite loop button on Spotify (who does that?) and listen to it over and over again in the car. Ultimately I decided it would be doing YWAG a disservice if I were to release another half-baked article about a single instead of waiting for the full album. Especially since…. it’s a concept album, my favorite.
YWAG really outdid themselves with this record, which is cool because I already love everything they’ve ever put out. It’s really great to see a band just continue to push their art more and more. The emotion is very palpable in the music, and as I learned the lyrics through listening (and then finding them on youtube), I started to piece together an intricate, moving, story about dealing with death and the afterlife. Plus, there’s a bit of a mythical, magical kind of feel to the second half of the album. These guys definitely mastered the art of story through music with this one, and I’m very excited to get into it.
The last thing I wanted to say before I get into it is that I originally was upset when the album released and I realized that every song had been previously put out as a single except for the interlude tracks and the final song, This Place is Deafening. At the time I was frustrated because I wanted more, but I realize now that the reason they released the songs on the album as singles was just because of the way the music market and streaming works these days. It’s not their fault at all that the majority of people streaming music don’t listen to albums and this whole short attention span thing has made it so if you’re not doing multiple releases in a row you become irrelevant. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter to me what bands have to do to hold popularity because I want them to be as successful as possible. This album was still fantastic to listen to as a cohesive work, and the “Segue” songs added a lot.
The album begins with a song called Dreadbound, which was also the first single released. They actually released each single in its chronological order of where it appears on the album, which I’m sure was intentional. Dreadbound talks about the inevitable death of your loved ones around you. I think, more than that, this song is a very personal confession of feelings about losing your father. I based my entire idea of the album around this very foundation, so I hope that I got that right, otherwise I’ll look pretty stupid. The song starts with a verse talking about the inevitability of death and feeling it all around you, but then flows into more lyrics that are more specific, describing scenes like a celebration of life or maybe visiting this person while you watch them fade away. I love the way the chorus is worded in this song because it could change meaning depending on what point in your life you apply it to.
Every morning I am Dreadbound
Hoping for stasis
Desperate to make things stay the same
It’s been coming all my life
This could honestly apply to me, right now, being afraid of growing older. My birthday is coming up and every year I get closer to 30 and I feel like I don’t have much to show for all of these years. It’s hard growing older each year while looking at the list of things you haven’t accomplished yet. While I think they intentionally made these lines feel ambiguous as a way to help more people relate, the canon meaning is about this father who is growing older and getting sick, fading away. The songwriter here is desperately clinging to the way things are right now, knowing that one day they could wake up to their worst fear. At the same time, though, there’s some awareness with the line “It’s worse to hesitate like this,” acknowledging the fact that it’s going to happen and everyone has to deal with it. The anxiety of worrying about when death will come takes a toll. Simpler still, it could be change they’re so afraid of; I know I’ve had sleepless nights worrying over the potential for things to change.
As for the musical side, Dreadbound is probably the heaviest song on the album. I think it comes from the higher amount of screaming in this song. I’ve always been a fan of harsher vocals being used as a tool rather than filler as it is in a lot of post-hardcore these days. I’m also not arguing against having harsh vocals as your main vessel for lyrics, but I do think the vocals need to fit the emotional content. Plus, in post-hardcore there’s a lot more weight placed on normal vocals and vocal melodies. One of my favorite things about this band is their intricate melody writing. As the album goes on, we actually hear a lot of similar notes between songs. I haven’t quite figured out what the melodies all mean, but I believe it’s important when we hear similar note groupings, like the ones in the beginning of this song that are repeated in the song Heartwood and beyond. (They actually addressed this on their instagram, go check out the cool videos they did about themes in their writing!)
The last line of the song functions almost the same as a cliffhanger at the end of a tv show episode; “So I watch as he drifts away.” A somber ending to the song confirming that the fear of death was warranted after all. This was the line that first made me realize what this song was truly about. I listened to it several times without really learning all the lyrics, and then when I heard that line clearly for the first time i went, “wow, what the fuck? this is sad.” But I love when a song makes you feel that way. This song goes into the first of four “Segue” tracks that function as interludes between the main songs. It’s called Words Untold, and it features some bird and jungle sounds that I think act as a sort of foreshadowing for the rest of the album. It could be a glimpse into this afterlife / purgatory realm that the second half of the album is set in (spoilers!). The only lyrics are:
And he says to me
Don’t leave me here
Pretty powerful stuff, I actually thought the first line was “The pieces of me,” which I had been trying to think about how it fit and I had already come up with something to say when I realized I had the line wrong. I really like this line because I think as humans we often put a lot of emphasis on last words with loved ones. In reality if those were someone’s last words to me I think it would stick with me forever, and it’s kind of frightening to try and imagine what was going through that person’s head as they said them.
The next song, Something Has to Change, starts us off with this sort of theoretical, one-sided conversation that I believe is what the songwriter is thinking in their head every time someone asks them how they are in the wake of losing their father. Kind of like, “How are you doing?” “Feels like I’ve been hit by a tidal wave, thanks for asking.” It’s something you’d probably never say to someone who asked you how you were doing because even with the best intentions, most people who ask you how you’re doing post personal tragedy generally aren’t expecting you to be fully honest like that.
This song is a sort of reflection on the way the main character feels about their father and the end of his life. Lamenting that they had so much time to speak but never really talked, which fits into the previous song’s theme Words Untold. How often do we talk to our loved ones without really saying what we want to say because we think that we’ll have other time to say it? It’s a pretty sobering thought. I don’t want to list every single lyric from the album that I love because this article would be nothing but quotes, but let me just say this whole song has a lot of great poetic lines about dealing with a close death and the regrets and other feelings that come with it.
The last section of the song remarks on the enormous change that happened to the main character through this experience. They used to be passionate and full of life, then this hit them so hard they don’t know what to do with themselves. It’s really saddening that even though everyone knows death is a part of life, we still take it very hard when it hits close to home. I have personally only seen death up close a few times, but it was tough for different reasons each time. I still hold guilt over things I should have done, could have said. It makes me feel better knowing that almost everyone has this same experience at some point and can relate in different ways. I will say that during the process of me writing this article, I ended up calling my dad (we live on opposite sides of the US) and told him that I really appreciated him and I was sorry for not calling more often. I definitely don’t want to wake up one day with no father and only regrets.
After another interlude (instrumental only) we arrive at the climax of the album, Heartwood, which is my personal favorite. Like I said before, i was listening to this song sometimes 6 or 7 times in a row in the car. I don’t really know why, but it just really spoke to me through the music and felt calming in a way. There’s a lot of great emotion captured in this song, so let’s get into it. The song starts with the album’s title, “Don’t Leave Me Here.” Before I knew what all the lyrics to this song were, I had a very lucid image in my head of this first scene. I imagined the main character as a young boy, following their father down a dirt road, asking the question “what if I’m right behind and you turn to look but I’ve gone?” I thought the song was a snapshot of a memory of being lost as a kid, or maybe a dream about the fear of losing sight of your safety net while walking along. It made me think this song was about nostalgia and childhood, which now I realize wasn’t really it.
What’s really happening in this first part of the song is the main character is thinking back to those words that their father said to them. They’re driving along and can’t get the words out of their mind and then realize that they don’t really care if they drive off the road anymore. “Maybe it’s time to see where you’ve gone.” I hate to say it but this might be one of the most beautiful depictions of suicide I’ve ever heard before. Not to say that I think it’s glorifying it in any way. One of my personal dealings with death was shortly after high school when an acquaintance of mine through both school and work committed suicide by driving his car into a tree. I’ve always wondered what was going through his head in that moment and until now I always thought it was pure hopelessness and fiery passion that caused him to do what he did. This song honestly brings me a bit of relief hearing a different point of view. Maybe he wasn’t teeming with negative emotion at all, and he was really calm as it all happened. It’s honestly a bit hard to think about and I apologize to anyone reading if this is tough to read or hurts you in some way, but I think that this is a bit of a cathartic release for me as I haven’t really talked about this time in my life very often and I have a lot of guilt weighing on me from this tragedy, even now almost 10 years later.
As we move into the middle part of the song, there’s some really beautiful chord changes, perhaps my favorite thing about You Win Again Gravity is their fantastic chord progressions. The drums in this song are, of course, on point and flow really well with the song. There’s a lot of switching between down and up beat accenting, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot in my own playing that I got from JP Bouvet, who teaches this sort of “melodic voicing” on the drums through his technique of changing the accent, called The Down-Up method. Then, suddenly, there’s this ethereal sounding section where there’s some special processing on the vocals, which sound mysteriously like the vocals in the Untold Words segue track. We then hear the lines:
I’ve arrived
Within the trees
Sleeping, life
Or in between?
And this signals to us that our main character has passed through to some alternate reality, whether that’s a dream, purgatory, heaven, hell? We’re not really sure what it’s supposed to be at this point. All we know is that this place resembles a jungle or forest, and I think we can also safely assume that everything in this reality takes the shape of forest-dwelling animals like on the cover of the album. Then, the mention of Heartwood makes me think of a few different things. The first of those is the old Redwall series written by Brian Jacques. I grew up reading these books and there was always this beautiful sense of comradery and community between the various animals as they journeyed around on their quests. I’m honestly not 100% sure why Redwall comes to my mind, but it probably has something to do with all the forest creatures on the album cover.
The other pop culture reference I thought of from this song (and the rest of the album) is the game, SpiritFarer. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a management style video game where you play a character named Stella, who takes on the duties of Charon the ferryman in taking spirits to their final resting place. The caveat is that you actually have to take care of their wants and needs while they travel with you, until they decide that they’re ready to pass on. It’s a very heartwarming experience to play through this game, and it forced me to think more about death and how to deal with it. Now, I hate spoilers, but for the purpose of relating back to the album I have to spoil this game so if you haven’t played it and want to then you should skip over this next section.
During Spiritfarer, you have some routine meet ups with Death, who takes the form of a great big owl (this will be important soon). In your final meeting with death, it feels like you’re supposed to have this big “boss battle” style encounter, but instead you end up learning that the real Stella is dying of cancer in the hospital, and that she spent her life caring so much for those around her, that her way to move on and cope with her own death is taking care of her loved ones (and some strangers). It’s a hard moment to swallow, but ultimately there’s no “boss battle,” and Death isn’t defeated in the end. The main message here seems to be that Death may be scary but it’s not inherently evil, and there’s no running from it. Everyone will face it in their lives because it’s a part of life, and you have to learn what works best for you personally. I’m not sure if anyone in the band has played this game and meant for there to be so many parallels in the content, but I thought of it very quickly after I started putting the narrative together.
I’ve talked a lot about this one song, but I still have a few more things to say. The main thing that made me love this song was this set of lyrics after our protagonist has arrived in this strange new land:
You’re waiting, You must be near
What if I’m right behind you?
Don’t leave me here
I’m well aware with loss comes learning
I cannot claim the past, just choose my path
Ah, there’s so much to unpack here. first off, the line “What if I’m right behind you?” is repeated from the beginning of the song with just one word swapped out. I love how this line has sort of a double meaning where in the first part of the song he means what if he’s meant to die and follow his father to the afterlife? This second mention though might have another meaning: He’s now crossed into this strange purgatory-sort-of world and everything is different, maybe he can find his father here. Same thing with the next line, our album title: On first mention he repeats the line that his father said to him before he died, but this second mention is now about himself being left behind now that he’s arrived on the same plane. The last two lines here are just really poetic and serve the song and narrative well. It’s almost striking a defiant tone when he basically says he knows he’s supposed to learn from this loss but he doesn’t want to move on.
The tone of the album changes a bit from this point on, and in the next segue track we hear a sample from a bird expert about snowy owls and how they’ve been depicted in caves and drawings since ancient human times. On my first listen to the album I was confused by this track and how it fit into the narrative, but I was able to piece it together once I did some research on the importance of snowy owls in religion/mythology. It turns out that snowy owls are a symbol for the afterlife, and often seen as guides through the afterlife for our deceased loved ones. I found several accounts of grieving individuals who saw snowy owls shortly after a loved one had passed, and feeling a calm come over them, as if they knew then that their loved one had passed peacefully to the other side. Now, you guessed it, we see how this connects back to Death being depicted as a giant owl in Spiritfarer. With all the different animal depictions in that game, it’s no wonder they chose an owl for death itself, especially with the nature of the game being the passing of loved ones. Now the last thing about this as we move to the next song; I hadn’t noticed it at first for some reason, but the album cover actually has a large snowy owl gazing down over the woodland creatures. I intentionally neglected to say the title of this track, A Way Back, until now because I think it’s very relevant to the information about the owls being spiritual guides of some sort.
The next song on the album is called Lost Within the Leaves, and it paints a new picture of this place our protagonist has arrived in. We have a new theme that is introduced in the first line, “I gave in, the quiet deafening,” which I think is a metaphor for inner turmoil and mental illness. Our main character here admits that he gave in when he was driving and understands that he’s crossed into this new plane of existence. Then, our main character actually does reunite with his father (I think), and one of them says to the other that they’re surprised to see them here, so I assume it’s the father speaking to the protagonist since his whole goal was to find his father, why would he be surprised about it? There are several lines during this song that suggest this world is like some depictions of purgatory, where they see things from their life and are faced with regrets and failures. All the while, the main character is wanting to get away to somewhere safe to talk to their father, as if something is wrong with where they are now. There are a few references to animal-like qualities here, too, like flying above the trees or moving fast on the forest floor. Thus, I assume that in this world, similar to spiritfarer, the spirits appear as anthropomorphic forest creatures as depicted on the album cover. The chorus of the song is important to our owl / afterlife symbols:
And yet, through the trees
I can feel that there’s something wrong
With this place, two eyes like black holes
looming over us
Here we’re given insight to how our main character is feeling off about the whole place. We also learn of the two black eyes watching over the trees, like our owl shown on the album cover. But this raises more questions than it answers; Why can’t he find a place to talk to his father? Why is the owl constantly gazing over the forest? My guess is that while the main character feels like he’s being watched over by a malevolent presence, the owl actually isn’t meaning him any harm. This is just the owl’s domain as he helps spirits pass onto the afterlife. I also don’t think that our main character here has fully accepted that he’s dead yet, and maybe thinks that this is all a dream, despite the fact that he acknowledged his actions in the beginning of the song. It’s ended with a sort of cliffhanger line setting us up for the last song: “That face again above the trees, the warmth leaves me.”
The next segue track is titled Minerva, and it’s rather uneventful, but I found the name of it to be interesting. For those who like Greek / Roman mythology, Minerva is the name given to the Roman version of the Greek goddess Athena. The reason this is interesting is because Athena is the goddess of wisdom (among other things) and one of her symbols is the owl! I do find it interesting how many songs tend to use the roman names of these gods rather than the original Greek names. My main example that comes to mind is the song The Oddyssey, by Symphony X. In the original Greek epic, Odysseus is granted power and a disguise by Athena as he returns home to retake his throne. In the song by Symphony X, they have the line, “In the guise of a beggar, Minerva guides my way.” I wonder if the choice had anything to do with Greek vs. Roman tellings of the story or if they just thought the name rolled off the tongue better in the context of the song.
And finally, we arrive at the last song of the album, This Place is Deafening. In the title we already see the mentioning of the “deafening” theme we saw in the last song, but this time I think it’s referring to the main character being faced with all his failures and regrets as he presumably passes through to the afterlife. It also seems like he’s made it into a different stage of the so-called journey he’s on. The song starts with this line showing the realization of where he’s ended up: “It was a second ago I sat next to your cold body and now I float or I fall or I drift, I don’t know which it is.” We come to our final instance of the album title, and with it comes both a new and old meaning. This time it’s not the father saying it as he died, it’s the main character saying it as he passes through the same phase of dying. It’s really a sign of expert storytelling through themes, the way they used this phrase throughout the album.
This last song is like an epiphany in our main character’s journey, all of the previous events lead to this moment so that he would finally face death, the same way Stella did in Spiritfarer. Death appears in the same depiction as Spiritfarer, an owl, and its dark talons descend upon him. I think in this moment he’s realizing what his father was saying to him on his deathbed; He was afraid. Now he is experiencing what his father experienced at the end, and he finally understands:
Feathers unfold
Words untold
Fear
He finally realizes his mistake in trying to follow his father into the afterlife, and this song sets the stage for the next half of the story in Don’t Leave Me Here, pt. 2. My prediction for the rest of the story is that there’ll be some adventure involving anthropomorphic animals, and eventually the main character will wake up at the scene of the car wreck or in a hospital and get to continue living his life. I hope that the story will end up being about closure and acceptance, almost like traversing through the stages of death.
My final thoughts on the album have more to do with the music. I know I spent a lot of time talking about the story, which is because I spent most of the time I was listening to this album imagining the world where these events were taking place. Something that surprised me with this album was their lack of time signatures in 7. As far as I can tell, they only have one small part in 7/4 during Lost Within the Leaves. This isn’t a criticism by any means, but just an observation because You Win Again Gravity honestly might be some of the most masterful 7-time writers I’ve ever heard. Their whole first two albums are full of very unique and awesome grooves, and I’ve spent a lot of time learning and memorizing them to try and expand my vocabulary in 7 as a drummer.
Another thing that blows me away with them is their vocal melody writing. I don’t think I truly understood how hard that was until I started trying to write my own music. I think we’ve all heard bad vocals done in a karaoke setting or even in just bad music, but to get truly amazing and catchy melodies while playing intricate chord changes is a great feat. I mentioned earlier that my favorite part of the entire album is the last verse of Heartwood, and a lot of that has to do with the vocal melody over the line, “What if I’m right behind you?” I don’t know what it is about that grouping of frequencies that makes my brain so happy, but it does. I’ve had similar experiences listening to this band before, like with the chorus of Suppression, off of their previous album. It’s no surprise to me that that was their first song to reach 100k streams.
The drums on this album are really impressive as well. One thing I noticed between different songs was that he used a lot of triplet fills on the splash with ghost notes on the snare in between, which is something I really love to do (albeit much worse). A lot of the drumming reminds me of Language by The Contortionist, with a ton of intricate ghosts and melodic voicing on the drums. I think Joey Baca was one of the first drummers that made me really appreciate dynamic articulation in metal/prog. Personally I find it very hard to be original when it comes to drum patterns in my own writing, and I appreciate that You Win Again Gravity has a lot of unique feeling grooves.
If you’re usually all about the music and technical aspects, I’m sorry that this article was almost 100% emotion and story. I can’t help but only write about bands that make me feel strong emotions when I listen to their music. I know that this article is coming out super delayed after the release of this album, but I do want to say that You Win Again Gravity ended up being my second most played artist of the year, and this album was my second most played album to match. The only artist/album that beat this one was To Sea, After Storm, by Castele. That was my AOTY in 2024, but alas, I couldn’t get enough of it from July to December, so it took over 2025 for me, too. This album for sure is my favorite release of 2025, though. I am so happy that they just announced their tour with BTBAM, and I hope this means big things are coming their way (US Tour?). Seriously, listen to this album, it’s very special and this You Win Again Gravity is doing amazing things. You won’t regret it.
Cheers!
