Screaming in Silence: The Brutal Beauty of “It’s Alright?”

The opening of “It’s Alright?” by sammy. /REVERSIES featuring 歌雨たう (commonly known as sammy. /REVERSIES x Utaame Tau) exudes a frail and almost whispery aura, as though the song itself is too terrified to make a sound. The soft texture of the voice and guitar, almost blood-like in its fragility, and the gentle yet eerie echo of the vocals create a palpable sense of vulnerability. There is a quiet, internal panic that resides in lyrics such as “Nobody wants me”, that manage to sound more painfully honest in their whispered delivery than if they had been screamed. There’s a sense of descending into the silence in which sadness doesn’t need to be screamed to fill every moment of quiet between the notes.

But, halfway through the song, there is a rupture. The silence is brutally shattered by the distortion and injection of an intense Japanese rap by a voice that is agonizingly soft yet vicious and sharp like shards of glass. It pierces, each word read so violently it’s as if one is reading someone’s diary out loud. It sounds so sincere as it’s almost sickening. But what an incredible juxtaposition it is. Sammy’s gentle introduction to the track is both completed and contrasted by an injection of a second vocal layer that breathes new life into the track. The shift is so dramatic, an inversion of what came before, that it elicits an instantaneous emotional response. While the first half of the track embodies a certain type of sadness, the second half contrasts it with an opposing emotion of anger, resulting in a mixture of emotional whiplash and confusion that ultimately makes sense, as we often don’t know who we are or where we are going in life.

The track then fades out to the silence and soft texture of the beginning but altered, as if something has changed. The final repetition of the line “It’s alright?” in this format is so alienating, a question asked in such a way that no comforting answer will ever suffice. On this track, the genres of grunge, emo, J-rock, and even hip-hop and rap coalesce so well, in part because none of it would have made sense otherwise. What Sammy has achieved here is a work that not only shows the potential for growth by being true to himself but also shows an evolution in the music itself.

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