Before we produced The Vandal and The Violet Storm, we went through a period of writing around a hundred lyrics in eighteen months. It was an intense stretch with no other creative output - no new melodies, no new production ideas, just words. During that time, we used AI for the first time. Not to write lyrics, but to review them. While we know AI can’t write the kind of lyrics we write, it turned out to be good at critiquing them: checking narrative arcs, metaphor consistency, structural clarity. That helped sharpen our writing.
But something else happened. We wanted to write about difficult subjects without reducing them to slogans - subjects like mortality, body dysmorphia, digital identity, cultural erosion, equality. Tackling themes like these without causing harm requires careful handling, and that meant leaning heavily into metaphor.
Metaphor can hold difficult truths without flattening them. It leaves room for interpretation, gives the listener space to think. That eighteen‑month process changed the way we write - and the way we think.
We only realised this when deciding what to release after The Vandal and The Violet Storm. Instead of choosing one of our new songs, we went back to a track we wrote years ago. We knew immediately it needed a rewrite.
Compared to our newer work, the old version felt too simple, too direct, too static. When we sat down to rewrite it, the new verses arrived instantly - deeper, more metaphorical. The bridge shifted perspective. The choruses did what they were meant to do. The old habits were deleted one word at a time.
It might sound like a geeky observation, but it revealed something bigger. Our writing had evolved - and so had our thinking. We no longer wrote about climate change as an event; we rewrote it as an emotion. We no longer wrote about mortality as observation; it became erosion, pressure, tides. We could talk about war through the developing mind of an unborn child. The process became more meaningful because we had become more thoughtful.
Writing more thoughtfully made us more thoughtful. More mindful. More willing to sit with discomfort. More willing to challenge our own assumptions. More willing to consider all sides of an argument, even when we still hold strong convictions.
Never She Said will never be mainstream - but that was never the point. It’s the shape of a worldview, one that didn’t arrive fully formed, but unfolded line by line, metaphor by metaphor, song by song.
And the next song we plan to release - an environmental track called Stay - carries that journey in every word.
