The trio — Spaziani on guitar and vocals, Bellanca on bass, Doug Folen behind the kit since 2024 — wear their record collections lightly. The angular pull of the Pixies surfaces in the way verses snap into choruses without warning; Hum's molten guitar tone hums beneath the surface; Primus-style elasticity shows up in basslines that refuse to sit still even when the song around them wants to. None of it reads as homage for its own sake. These reference points have been digested, not displayed, and what emerges instead is a band finding its own grammar for unease.

That unease is the record's true subject. Spaziani has spoken candidly about writing much of this material while wrestling with OCD and depression, and that candour gives the songs their weight without ever curdling into self-pity. "Margarine of Error" is the clearest distillation of the whole project: a song that turns the chaos of an overactive, self-tormenting mind into something almost danceable, its half-spoken vocal delivery lending the lyrics a queasy, confessional intimacy. It is the sound of someone narrating their own unravelling and somehow keeping perfect time while doing it.

"No End" pulls in a different direction entirely, and it is here that the band's grunge roots feel most thoroughly left behind. The song stretches out, patient and bleak, building a sense of hopelessness that never resolves into catharsis — which is, of course, the point. Few bands are brave enough to let a song simply ache without offering the listener relief, and Sipul's willingness to sit inside that discomfort rather than resolve it marks a genuine compositional maturity.

Elsewhere the band's appetite for texture pays dividends. "Familiar Stranger" folds in field recordings of a rotary phone, a typewriter, a wood saw, bells, shovels — the detritus of a basement turned into instrumentation — and the effect is less gimmick than atmosphere, a haunted-house clatter that underlines the album's recurring fascination with reality slipping its moorings. The conceptual thread running through the record, borrowed loosely from an urban legend about a man who wakes from a coma unsure whether the decade he just lived was real, gives the whole thing a spectral throughline without ever tipping into concept-album indulgence.

What lingers after the record ends is not despair but its aftermath: the sense of a chapter closed. Spaziani has described the album as catharsis, a means of getting something out before it consumed him, and that intent is audible in every choice the band makes, from the unpolished basement ambience to the willingness to let a song like "No End" simply sit in its own discomfort. *In The Still* is the sound of a band turning private struggle into shared language, and doing so with a tenderness that never once feels manufactured. Sipul have made a record that earns its bruises honestly, and listeners willing to sit with it will find real reward.