Mental Illness by HOLLOW LOGICK is a rough, baleful exploration of anxious life under major mental illness. These are distinguished words for their candour, never flinching or bowdlerising distress into a pleasant or therapeutic commodity. HOLLOW LOGICK presents instead a harsh photograph of inner suffering as grinding, sloppy, and genuinely human.

These lyrics are effective because you see the tug-of-war in HOLLOW LOGICK’s head. A compromise between needing and pushing away, between violence and vulnerability. When you see him talk about going to a shrink, you see a distrust and rage, a sign of some hurt that can’t easily be dispelled by speech. His words about his father’s abuse account for part of his rage, but you feel also that these images haunt him throughout his waking day. Pain’s not just in his past—it’s here, scratching under his skin and making his own thoughts circle around.

The entire while, HOLLOW LOGICK employs striking images to graphically render his state of his mind. Seeing demons when you look into a mirror, hearing voices in a ceiling fan, or spitting out blood after you’ve had glass are all things which afflict you that you can’t graphically see. These images do not feel redundant; they necessarily flow from confusion and paranoia that constitute his life. Repetition of hallucination, voices, and violence makes these things relentless and suffocating.

The lyrics have a manic for-hold-onto-something desperation in them as well. HOLLOW LOGICK doesn’t insist on being calm or pitied; what he needs is clarity—a break from paranoia and rage haze. Even violence or self-mutilation isn’t extolled; these are a method of feeling something real, having some sort of relation to a different and belligerent world. His claim of cutting to feel attachment is harshly honest and addresses a aspect of mental illness people don’t wish to discourse on: feeling alive by possibly wounding yourself.

Noted, too, is how HOLLOW LOGICK mollows on lost potential. He might have been a m.d., now settles on pills. There’s guilt involved here, and irritation and desolation. It’s not as though life had gone sour—it’s as though life goes sour anyway regardless of what he’s doing. This stasis feeling recurs in lines describing phone calls by a counselor that go unanswered and pills on his shelf that don’t count for a damn.

Paranoia is another forceful theme, made evident by his own fear that even his closest friends had the capacity to harm him. His lyrics detail violence toward someone he was sure was plotting against him, and even afterwards, he second-guesses if perhaps he was in the wrong. This continued second-guessing makes the song tense because, as valid as the threat is potentially out in the world, its worst seed is planted deep inside his own psyche.

Lastly, Mental Illness is not a hope or recovery song. HOLLOW LOGICK doesn’t guarantee recovery or change. He provides instead what it is like to experience pain that never goes away, to wrestle demons while stumbling blindly in shadows with no escape. Honesty in these lyrics makes them remarkable. These lyrics don’t pretend, don’t apologize, and don’t pretend to motivate. These lyrics speak truth as it is—ugly and heavy and hurt-ingly real. It is honesty that makes the song hurt so much and that makes its existence a necessity.