An album to ruin your day.

From Reddit's Xiu Xiu guide:

"A Promise is Xiu Xiu's second album, released on February 18th, 2003. A Promise was written shortly after Jamie Stewart's father tragically took his life. It affected his mother so deeply, Jamie made a promise never to take his life while she was alive—hence the title. Many of the songs on A Promise deal with themes of suicide, familial tension, and depression (Apistat Commander, Blacks, Walnut House), with the lyrics of Blacks being solely compromised [...] of things Jamie's father said to him before his passing.

At times, A Promise's production becomes a disharmonious, metallic soundscape of glitches and tense, melodic synths. Then it falls to a lull; reserved acoustics boast Jamie's pained voice. Both of these approaches highlight the tremendous gravity of the emotions contained in this tortured record—the screeching melodies and cacophonous shrieks on Blacks capture the foreboding decisiveness of suicide ideation, while the minimal instrumental and whispered vocals on Fast Car wrap you in their helplessness. The wailing, shimmering synths on the closing track, Ian Curtis Wishlist, finish off the album with tragic finality: A Promise may be over, but its agony never eases."

This album is a hard listen by design. Both the lyrics and the instrumental make the listener unconfortable. In my opinion, we really have no bussiness listening to this album, it's clearly each member of the band's way of coping with the traumas they've been subjected to. It's easy to tell the album wasn't really meant for us by how some lyrics would've never made sense hadn't they been explained by Jamie Stewart at a later date.

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