The opener, "Trial by Fire," sets the terms immediately: strings sawing away like a mob assembling, guitars roaring in with the theatrical menace of Muse at their most operatic. It is witch-hunt imagery repurposed as industry critique, and it works because Xxäm sings it like someone who has actually felt the kindling stacking beneath their feet. From there, "Riddle Me This" swaggers in on Eurythmics-indebted syncopation and harp glissandos that shouldn't belong together but do, a giddy argument between focus and chaos that never resolves and is smarter for it.

What follows is a record unafraid to get uncomfortable. "Eyes on the Devil" is the album's nerve centre — organ, flute, and static crackle building a medieval hush before the whole thing folds inward into something close to dread. Few records this year have rendered neurodivergent shame with such unflinching specificity, and fewer still have trusted static and silence to do the emotional heavy lifting rather than a swelling chorus. "Fighting with Lions" answers it with sheer physical force: stuttered kicks, orchestral stabs landing like blows, a Björk-shaped fever dream of a track that turns dislike into something almost gladiatorial.

Xxäm's real gift, though, is knowing when to let the arrangement breathe. "Voice of Reason," the record's lone political moment, strips back to stark synth and thick pads, letting an imagined dialogue with cruelty speak plainly rather than shouting over it. "Always Been the Same" does something trickier still, wrapping anxious mental loops in dry, self-aware humour, an Alison Moyet-inflected ballad that earns its warmth by admitting how hard-won it is.

The back half turns toward light without ever cheapening the darkness that came before. "Zygote" glistens and jumps octaves over a heartbeat kick, wordless in places because some kinds of love resist language. And closer "Black Doves" is the payoff the whole record has been quietly building toward: harp, choral layers, strings that lift rather than swell, transforming loss into something closer to flight. Kate Bush's fingerprints are all over it, but Xxäm earns the comparison rather than borrowing it.

Across the full sequence, the production choices never feel arbitrary. Gregorian chants nestle against four-on-the-floor basslines on "Settle for Less," glitchy arpeggios collide with a Holst-referencing choir on "Freshly Fell," and none of it reads as pastiche. It reads as a genuine synthesis — art-pop theatre, synthwave pulse, and electronic grit stitched together by a vocalist who understands that duality isn't a concept to illustrate but a condition to inhabit.

This is an album that trusts its own strangeness. It doesn't resolve its contradictions for the listener's comfort, and it doesn't need to. Chaos and hyper-focus, shame and triumph, static and choir: Xxäm holds all of it in tension and calls that tension the point. Rarely does a first album arrive this fully formed, this emotionally exact, or this confident about the noise it's willing to make.