HIT LIKE LIGHTNING demo vs final (Patreon)

Okay I thought the Angel one was bad but I found this on my hard drive and it's infinitely worse. I had completely forgotten how bare bones HLL was originally!

The funny thing with this song is that it was borne from me trying to get a specific texture/staccato pattern with a bass patch that I had made, purely for practise reasons. I've always been a big fan of very gritty, glitchy bass-heavy music and even as I've built my own sound in electropop, I've still spent a lot of time trying to prove to myself that I can make the sounds I wasn't good enough to figure out when I was 15, haha. So I made the bass loop that you hear in the HLL drop, and honestly for some time it just sat there dormant on my drive.

The real breath of life for this song came when I went away to Rotterdam in the summer of 2024 to work as a presenter/commentator at TwitchCon. It was a super fun trip (Rotterdam >> Amsterdam and I will take that to the grave) even though I got unbelievably sick with norovirus on the last day and had to get myself back to the UK on two trains while not even able to hold down water... But it was also a time where I was going through a ton of very intense processing. And I just remember, for whatever reason, coming home to the UK and for the first time ever thinking 'fuck the person who sabotaged my esports job. I don't need to feel like I'm subjugated by this person anymore.' Even though I didn't know when karma would do its thing, I just had a really strong feeling that one day it would. (Fun fact: karma did do its thing -- the week the song came out. I'm amazed no one drew the connections to figure out who it was about yet.)

So once I'd recovered from norovirus, I sat at my PC and just wrote the song in pretty much one sitting. It was pretty much my actual stream of consciousness, what with the 'Oh, there are so many things I wish I could say.' I genuinely didn't know how to condense all of my feelings into a song. It was a real breakthrough in me no longer feeling controlled by my rapist ex or this awful ex-colleague. The line 'I wonder what you're thinking now. Is it that I'm cringe? Is it that I'm ugly? Is it that you don't like when my boobs are out to see?' is based in the fact that just a couple of weeks prior, a very drunk friend at a party had told me that this person continued to go through my Instagram and talk about my body for up to 1.5 years after I left the broadcast we had both worked on. I remember being so bemused and incredulous that it was just funny to me. I realised that it didn't matter if they felt they'd won by fucking my career, because they'd reached levels of pathetic that I simply couldn't attain. :)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this very rough demo! Peep the original vocals that actually made it into the final song too. If there's one thing about me it's that I'm so lazy when it comes to vocal tracking and if I can use an original take, I absolutely will.

I'm hoping to film some production walkthroughs for some of the songs for you guys soon but I'd love to know which songs interest you the most! So let me know and I'll see you again soon! <3 Geo