Ceyeo’s third album Together They Were Nothing arrives like a storm front, charged, anxious, and unwilling to look away from the fractures between people. After the optimism of Baby I Care and the searching spirit of Machine Learning, this 2024 release digs into darker terrain of unhealthy relationships, collapsing unity, and the psychic bruises we collect along the way. Built on Ceyeo’s literate lyricism, genre-bending arrangements, and a breathy vulnerable voice.
“Confession” opens the record with shimmering cymbals and tight, catchy guitars, the singer’s high husky voice strains with tension. She sings like she’s trying to hold the entire relationship together with his chest alone. She sings, “our faith’s broken, heart’s broken” as the song crashes in waves of remorse and exhaustion. It’s raw, it’s exposed, and it sets the emotional bar high.
Then the mood drops into the bruised “I Can Tell,” where gruff, breathy vocals meet writhing violin lines and restless cymbals. The song spirals between anger and longing, the poet-to-police metaphor sharpening the sense of collapse. He sings, “We are dogs in a cage jumping on the fence,” to demonstrate defeat like no other.
But Ceyeo doesn’t stay still. “Love Is Angry” erupts with pounding shimmer and adrenaline-shot vocals, twisting love into a weapon, a bolt of lightning, a war on the senses. It’s frantic, exhilarating, with love as combustion.
“Bedlam” widens the scope with bells tolling in the mind, hive minds stumbling, and Van Gogh growing up “in a world of violence.” The guitars brood while the lyrics dig into greed, longing, and the psychic cost of living awake.
By the album’s later tracks, “Contact,” with its cinematic stream-of-consciousness, and “Colossus,” a slow, aching lament about grief and memory, while the emotional landscape stays as vast as it is intimate. The closer, “This Is How You Win,” turns its gaze outward again, skewering power, greed, and the machinery of oppression.
Together They Were Nothing is Ceyeo at his sharpest—furious, vulnerable, and utterly unafraid to stare down the darkness we pretend not to see.
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Review by: Naomi Joan