It hurts to play. I’ve kind of gotten more used to it now, but it’s not an easy song to perform. Or just to know that there’s a song that talks about, even vaguely, probably the worst experience of my life. I remember we performed in Knoxville recently and it was right on the anniversary of the thing that happened that I’m talking about. And I just had been avoiding thinking about it, but it all kind of came out and attacked me. The scary part is finding out, while singing the song, how much I’m going to feel it that day, and how much I’m prepared to feel it. Sometimes I get freaked out and have a moment onstage, but usually it’s really therapeutic because I’m vanishing that feeling from my body.

–Karly Hartzman via Apple Music

Excerpted from their label Dead Oceans, via Wednesday’s Bandcamp:

The first half, “Bull,” is a description of watching someone succumb to addiction and the desperation you feel in being helpless to find a reason worthy enough to stop them, while the second half, “Believer,” dips into a memory of ultimate teenage sadness, an elegy for anyone who ever loved a shitty boy in the hazy glow of the television, of video games. It’s an image from high school where you’re drunk for the first time and it hits with a raw emotional bite, the first time you really “let loose,” and share your feelings outwardly in your friend’s living room . It’s tepid bathwater, makeshift roadside monuments in rural North Carolina, the sound of wind whistling when you drive through a tunnel, the moment when lightning strikes and sky and ground are fleetingly connected. And the screaming, guttural refrain of “Finish him,” how those experiences collide inside of both your memories and body, how they collect and make you into the person you are today.

Also, from that same article, vocalist Karly Hartzman specifically states:

“This song is an excuse for me to scream on stage, an outlet for the anger and sadness that has been collected by the current and past versions of myself. An offering to myself of a brief moment of release from being tolerant of the cruelty of life: feels like cutting my hair to let go of the history it holds.”

It’s a long-ass song, ’cause it takes me a while to prepare myself emotionally to sing the end. Everything leading up to that line is giving myself time to get in the headspace of that night. That New Year’s party was the last time I ever saw my friend who ended up passing away that year. And I have to perform that song every night on tour, so I need that time every time we play it. That is the line where I force myself to open that door into the room where that happened and eventually access the grief I experienced once he was gone.

It took me a while to put together in the sense that I hadn’t felt ready to write a song that confronts that. That was a memory from high school, so it took me three albums to reflect on it. I don’t go explicitly into what it’s about in the song, but in my mind it feels really explicitly about that. But the actual physical writing of the song happened pretty quickly once I gave myself permission to go there.

– Karly Hartzman, Vulture

I’ve wanted to do a screaming vocal for a long time. I’ve been trying to work my way up to it. I had this feeling in my mind where there’s something specific that I’ve wanted to scream about for a long time that happened when I was in high school that I really needed to write about first. And it’s what I end up tackling in “Bull Believer.” I felt like I won’t be able to unleash this beast that it takes to come out for a screaming vocal on a song unless I prioritize what I need to let go of first. “Bull Believer” was really just like a bridge I had to cross to get to where I wanna go with screaming in the future, and it ended up obviously being a really intense output.
I love performing that song. I loved composing it too with y'all and figuring out how to move from one part to the other, because performing it sort of feels like a journey and you’re like a roller coaster coming up and coming down and then coming around to this big finish that really feels good to hit for me.

– Karly Hartzman, Forbes

I went to a New Year’s party and I wrote down all of those details I could remember from that night, which have kind of gotten a little flimsy because it was years and years ago at this point.
The New Year’s party I’m describing was the last time I saw a friend who ended up passing away that year, so I think the first seven minutes of the song it’s me preparing to unload the emotion of losing him and describing the context of where I was in my life [at the time]. That song was really kind of like, not selfish, but it’s more for me,
because performing it is so therapeutic and writing it was really therapeutic.

– Karly Hartzman, The FADER