Seven Sounds, Forever. opens with a lone voice calmly listing the instruments as they arrive, each one entering gently until the arrangement becomes full of warmth, recalling the structural playfulness of Lemon Jelly’s The Staunton Lick but using folk textures instead of loops and samples. It’s a beautiful introduction that’s patient, considerate, and ironically self-aware.

Seven Sounds, Forever. is an album about loved lived under constant anxiety. Anxiety Dreams places you immediately inside Mike Halls head with remarkable vulnerability, capturing the very specific dread of repeatedly dreaming that you’ve lost your partner only to wake up and find them still there. The music sways gently, slowing and speeding and throughout the album Clean Cut Kid use folk as a foundation, but with a low-end warmth that gives the songs a subtle groove that you can nod along to even while the lyrics spiral. Real Big Shadow slows things down, and Iconoclast delivers the striking refrain “Heaven’s the one lie I wish I believed”.

This declaration of atheism is followed by the ironically titled Fear of God which captures the very specific panic of adulthood pressing in all from all sides as everyone else’s expectations pile up. The album is funny in its anxious bluntness throughout, as track titles like I’m a Piece of Shit suggest something far harsher on paper than what actually unfolds. These songs are more about giving intrusive thoughts voice so that they can be defanged than genuine self-loathing and despair. Music Is Royally Fucked broadens the scope outward, offering a clear-eyed observation of the contemporary music landscape outside of the millionaire tier, asking what anyone is supposed to do now that the money’s gone and the systems are hollowed out, and what stops all of this from becoming miserable or indulgent is the way it sounds like friends in a band playing together instead of a lone figure collapsing inward.

There’s warmth in the arrangements and humour in the self-awareness, as anxieties are shared rather than dumped on the listener. In fact, the anxiety is so over-exposed and unfiltered that it becomes comically confessional, with nothing held back, and no attempt to polish the fear into something noble or profound. It’s just there, naked in full view. Instead of despairing over the unglamorous reality of life outside the corporate world, where prospects are uncertain and making music for its own sake feels increasingly impractical, the album shrugs and keeps going asking what else is there to do but make more music with the people you care about.

Seven Sounds, Forever. is painfully anxious, but it’s also funny and full of life. It doesn’t pretend that love is secure or that the future is bright, but it does insist that connection, creativity and honesty are still worth it. In a time with very little reassurance, that feels pretty meaningful.