Like this absurd reference to Natalie Portman, despite its lonely connotations, Wright’s humour keeps the album from collapsing under its own dread. There were, apparently, limits. “A lot of songs didn’t make it that were a little funny,” he says. His bandmates intervened: “This is too corny, man. You can’t do this.”
Still, humour becomes another survival mechanism for the band. “Meetings” transforms romantic devastation into a feverish spiral of making your liver sick and driving a car into the river. Wright has described it as an attempt to numb a broken heart with whiskey and his older brother’s F-150. It is simultaneously pathetic, funny and genuinely sad – a recurring emotional cocktail across , and even at his most self-destructive, Wright rarely lets misery get in the way of a good hook. Its video also brought TVOD back to yet another French farm. With a day off between shows, the band decided to stay there and film it themselves. “It was really cute,” Wright remembers. “We got to pet the farm animals and there were a bunch of cows. There was one cow there that was a day old. It was wild. And the music video came out like a week after we filmed it.” They even got to name three newborn cows – “Billy, Brooklyn. And another B, I want to say like, Berry or something,” Wright shares enthusiastically.
The cover of is a particular highlight, as it’s a 12-by-12-inch diorama Wright constructed on his kitchen table. “I grew up with a kid that loved model trains,” he explains. “We used to just look at his train sets. And for some reason, when I listened to [the early demos of] for the first time, I was like, ‘This instantly conjures up a model train set for me.’” It also curdled into something considerably more sinister. “I wanted to kind of recreate a scene out of or something, where it’s this deranged hellscape of, like, animals killing people.”
In doing so, it evokes an accidental panoptic quality. A farm might promise privacy – a retreat from the city and the outside world – yet here, the maker and viewer hover above this miniature world, able to survey it all from a privileged position outside it. Everything is contained and everything can be observed. Wright hadn't consciously designed that perspective as another extension of the record's interest in control and power, but when the interpretation is put to him, he laughs at how neatly it fits. “It just happened to be like that."