You know you’re in trouble when staring at a blank Logic Pro project file starts to feel like a staring contest with a very judgmental ghost.

We are currently deep in the trenches of writing our third release, and I am officially ready to declare that whoever invented the concept of the “sophomore slump” got off easy. The second record is just a continuation of momentum—you’re still running on the fumes and leftover b-sides of the honeymoon phase. But the third one? The third one is where the universe looks at you, crosses its arms, and asks, “Okay, genius, what else you got?”

For our first two EPs, writing was basically an archaeological dig. We just had to reach down into the box of riffs, half-finished hooks, and late-night voice memos we’d been accumulating for years, dust them off, and piece them together. We weren’t really writing songs; we were just curating the greatest hits of our past lives.

Now, the box is empty. Every single chord progression, every lyric, every synth patch has to be dragged kicking and screaming out of thin air, right here, right now. It turns out that relying on a lifetime of accumulated material is a fantastic strategy until you actually run out of a lifetime.

It’s easy to feel like you’ve lost the plot when every session turns into an overthinking marathon. You sit there questioning if a bassline sounds too much like something you did four years ago, or if changing the drum pattern makes you sound like a completely different band having an identity crisis.

At least we aren’t alone in the madness. Looking at the big leagues, you realize everyone hits this exact wall. This is the precise psychological territory where Oasis decided the solution to a tricky third album was just recording twenty-minute tracks fueled entirely by massive egos and industrial quantities of ego, and where Kurt Cobain was so terrified of repeating himself that he essentially brought a sonic cheese-grater to the studio just to see if the fans would stick around. They did, of course, but you can practically hear the collective sigh of relief echoing off the master tapes.

We might not be melting down in a sprawling countryside mansion or fighting over guitar amps just yet, but the existential dread is remarkably similar. Still, if writing this thing feels like pulling teeth, it probably means we aren’t just phoning it in. We’ve finally run out of easy answers—and I suppose that’s the price of admission if you actually want to make something worth listening to.

So, despite the existential staring contests and the empty vaults, the stubborn truth is we’re still right here in the thick of it. The third-album hurdle is meant to break you, but we’re refusing to cooperate. If everything goes according to plan, we’re actually aiming to drag these stubborn new tracks across the finish line and push the whole thing out into the world before the year is up. Wish us luck—we’re going to need it, but it’s going to be worth every dropped note.