COIN Takes Listeners On An Emotional Rollercoaster in 5th Studio Album Uncanny Valley
Alt-pop band COIN has just released their 5th studio album, Uncanny Valley. The album takes you on a trip and touches on unreciprocated love, growing up, and acceptance of yourself.
The first track sounds like a direct step into the future. It acts as the perfect introduction into the album as lead singer Chase Lawrence sings that he is “learning to love.” After fully listening to the album, you will understand why these lyrics perfectly encompass the album and its overarching theme of all the lessons you will encounter in your life ranging from love to heartbreak to growing up.
The album is interesting because it takes the listener on a journey of young love, and the excitement and repercussions that come with it. Young love consists of the honeymoon phase, a period of feeling like your lover could do no wrong. It consists of overthinking, tricking yourself into believing the worst case scenario. It’s about being confused about where the relationship is going— that is if it's going anywhere at all, or what the true meaning of anything really is. A vicious cycle that is all worth it for the right person. COIN represents all of that in their 14 track album.
A handful of the songs delve into the best parts of love in a relationship. Initially released as a single, “Chapstick” is upbeat and gets you excited about love. It's about the exhilaration and energy that comes with the beginning stage of a relationship. It's about the spontaneity and shared energy— that feeling of wanting to spend every waking moment with that person. The girl being sung about in the track is one described as a “wildfire,” she’s fierce and perfect in his eyes. Following "Chapstick,” “Cutie” delves into the excitement of a relationship, and feeling that everything is perfect and nothing can go wrong. Love is addictive and can easily blind you from obvious red flags or warning signs. Lawrence sings, “Every night with you is the cherry on top.” This girl becomes the center of his world, calling her his “tangerine.” There is repetition of referring to this girl as his tangerine throughout the song, possibly to foreshadow that although times with her can be sweet, they can also be sour, like a tangerine. The seventh track off the album, “I Think I Met You In a Dream,”falls in the middle of the album. A slow ballad charmed by gentle guitar strums, the artist remembers this girl in a deja vu aspect. Lawrence dreamily sings, “I think I met you in a dream / the way you move is like a distant memory.” The guitar solo toward the end of the song allows the listener to really understand and feel the emotions he was trying to convey— the beauty and magic of a girl whose love and presence seem unreal, ethereal even.
Conflicting with the love songs in this album, are also a couple songs about falling out of love. It’s the sad reality of falling in love with the wrong person, the falling out of love comes right after it, hitting you like a truck. “Killing Me” is another one of the slower tracks of the album. A song about realizing that someone does not truly love you, despite treating you like they do and saying that they do. “So I guess you were making it up when you loved me.” A stab to the heart, a feeling that hopefully no one has to go through. It's self-explanatory, it’s about the pain of someone saying they love you, and it not holding any meaning. “I feel you falling out of love and it's been killing me.” The thing about falling out of love is that it's in your gut that you feel that someone loses interest in you. It’s a slow and painful realization.
The order of the songs is interesting and accurately depicts what relationships with the wrong person are like. There is no one way track, it's a mix of emotions and it's confusing. Sometimes love makes you feel like you’re on top of the world, until it doesn’t. And that’s just how it’s supposed to be. “It Works” calls out the relationship and how it's been broken in more ways than one. People often put bandaids on broken relationships through gifts or false affirmations but the truth of the matter is that the love is gone, or it was never there at all. It’s my favorite song off the album for its raw, truthful words. I relate to it, especially in the line, “I'm sick of serotonin, looking at the bright side.” At the end of the day putting up a front gets tiring and it's important to address that in your relationships.
The last subject this album tackles is life and the many lessons it presents you. One of those lessons being what feels like to be loved and to fall out of love. “Plug Me In” is more of a sad reality check, an open letter to his younger self. He sings “once you grow up you don’t come back down.” It acts as a warning for himself, not to get too caught up in wanting to grow up because once you hit adulthood, there’s no coming back from it.
Finally, the album’s closing track, “Loving” is more of a gentle one that beautifully ties all of the songs together. It's a song about trying to see the brighter side of things despite everything seeming like it's falling apart. “Open your mind, it's better trying to move on than trying to rewind.” Everyone has trouble with moving on from the past, but at a certain point it's important to reflect on it, take your lessons with you, and then move forward with it.
After first listening to this album, it completely uplifted my mood; however, after examining the lyrics, I feel ready to pull out my journal and ponder my own life and where I am taking myself. In an album about falling in love, falling out of love, and how to move on from it, COIN reminds us that with love comes the good, the bad, and the ugly. That’s just what life has to present to us— it’s a constant question of what comes next.
