This started out so promising. Sure, the high end is a bit harsh, but the groove was good. The vocals kicked in, and things went downhill. For one, the vocal delivery of "long to live up to" is clumsy. I do like the guest vocals quite a bit, and that helped you out a lot here. You have all the ingredients for what should be a decent song, but it falls short. Not much in the way of melodic variety, but that seems like an intentional choice. You are doing the right thing by introducing elements, and taking them away at key points of the song, but I would argue that it might have served you well to have made those changes even more dramatic. Example: Maybe that snare doesn't even need to come in until the first chorus. Perhaps you could have introduced even more things in that final chorus to really drive the point home that the song has been building up over time. You could have things coming to a fever pitch by the end. I initially had you way lower in the rankings (in the bottom 4), but I ended up liking this quite a bit more with repeat listens. For one: The chorus hook is better than I thought. The mix also sounds WAY better in headphones than on speakers.

LYRICS: [OKAY] 1 point
STRUCTURE: [GOOD] 2 points
PERFORMANCE: [GOOD] 2 points
CONCEPT/CHALLENGE: [OKAY] 1 point
DYNAMICS/MIX: [OKAY] 1 point
SCORE: 7 out of 10

This is pretty solid, with some good electronic production (I particularly like that bleepy synth in the intro) and your vocals sound really good together. It does feel like the link to the title is a little tenuous but in the end my low ranking for this one is mostly just because there were a bunch of other songs that stuck with me more.

Nice groove, atmospheric. I like this kind of slower old-school NIN feel, although obvs he would’ve had a lot more interesting percussion. The chorus is a little weak, everything up to the prechorus sounded really fun, and then the chorus kind of lost the energy there a bit.