I'm Not Here To Berate Any Individual's Faith
Only Those Rooted In Exploitation & Hate
And The Broader Existential Evil Within

Just Retelling My Story
Of The Teachings Embedded In Me
And Putting It To Rest At Last

Empathize for those lost in these fears

Merry fucking eastre.

• The prompt for generating this album's artwork was something like "pink fluffy field with antlers", based on traits of my fursona's design. Initially, this was just an experiment to see what early diffusion models were capable of, not specifically intended for use in wHAT (or any album for that matter), but this particular set of images spoke to me so much that I knew I had to use it somewhere. In this album's context, I view it as symbolizing the shattered illusion of a "Heaven" I was promised, revealing the sinister sludge of impenetrable nonsense lurking underneath, only vaguely resembling anything I had imagined during my upbringing. The continual progression throughout the track covers also symbolizes the gradual existential realizations I was having, an ugliness slowly coming into view.

• I think this album was originally supposed to have a visualizer and/or a booklet, but didn't due to time constraints. My only evidence of this is a mysterious "assets" folder, containing thematically relevant images & videos that I never actually used for anything:

(I really do not feel like individually compressing & uploading every one of these files for display on the site. Sorry. Try some reverse image searching if you're really curious.)

• TRACK 1 begins by sampling one of Bull of Heaven's roman numeral pieces, and gets cut off by the deletion sound effect heard in old versions of ROBLOX Studio. The dialog that follows is based on a real interaction I remember having with a real Pastor Jackson in the church I was routinely dragged along to as a child, just broken down to an uncanny bare-minimum approximation. I believed this was the moment I officially got "saved", though I wasn't entirely certain, and my mom found that uncertainty really concerning back then, because her memory of getting "saved" was far more specific than mine, so I was encouraged to keep saying that same prayer any time I felt unsure. Like my salvation was a depleting stamina bar I had to manually replenish every so often. What a strange existence this was.

• TRACK 2 samples an actual piece of Christian children's music distributed by Awana, albeit not one that I specifically heard as a child, just something that came up in my research and sounded useful.

• The banjo loop heard in TRACK 3 is taken from a 3D "Johnny Johnny Yes Papa" animation so crude it bordered on surreal, now only preserved by the Chadtronic video Deep Into YouTube, which I assume is how I learned about that animation in the first place. The outro, meanwhile, samples the endings of several different Kingdom Heirs songs simultaneously, all doing the exact same Whole Quartet Sustaining Their Respective Notes thing. This shit is burned into my brain from not only having to hear their music during countless car rides growing up, but also being taken along to a concert of theirs every year, which would tragically be the only live music I'd ever get to see in my life up until my appearance at Ruby Deluxe in 2023. The Kingdom Heirs experience as a whole was so goddamn predictable that I'd even made a bingo card to fill out during each concert:

Also, this track somehow got played on NTS Radio, apparently during this specific show.

Also also, the parts where I make those weird noises of exasperation were only so intensely chopped up because I was worried people would misinterpret them as Moans of the Sexual variety. But honestly, who cares? Not my fault that I have such a sensual voice. Well, it kind of is, because my voice is a result of extensive manual training during the first year of my gender transition, but y'know, that doesn't mean I was specifically aiming for "sensual" per se, it's just a nice bonus.

• TRACK 4 begins with audio taken from a "Weekly Choir Practice Vlog Thing" I recorded on my 3DS around the age of 12, documenting the boredom of waiting for my parents to finish choir practice so they could come take me back home. I was only brought there in the first place because they still deemed me too young to be left home alone. Besides that, all of the other speech sampled in this track comes from YouTube videos I found uploaded by a different church I used to attend, so long ago that I was hardly old enough to even be conscious of it. Lastly, the "Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus..." occasionally heard in the instrumental is sampled from another Awana song, this time one I actually did hear growing up as part of my Bible study curriculum. Just some cutesy little ditty to help remember all the individual books. I don't want to remember.

• TRACK 5's opening speech is sampled from the endlessly bizarre YouTube channel RG JUBILEE, which also single-handedly led to the creation of my aliases Bethany's Brooks and QUEST.mpg. The preacher sampled afterwards is Steven Furtick of Elevation Church fame, who my mom instructed me to watch every day during the early months of COVID-19 as a replacement for our physical church, which I thankfully never had to attend again even after lockdowns were over. Eventually, I even managed to stop watching Elevation Church sermons without her knowledge, and began the agonizing process of deprogramming that this album aims to chronicle.

• The title of TRACK 6 quotes a line of code from a test room in UNDERTALE.

• TRACK 7's title was derived from a common trend in Discord reaction GIFs at the time, all simply captioned "despite all my rage". I never even knew about the Smashing Pumpkins song this was most likely referencing; I was solely viewing that phrase in a vacuum, and found it very evocative.

Also, the instrumental here was made entirely from sampling "In the End" by Linkin Park, in a way that should be nearly unrecognizable unless you already knew this beforehand.

• TRACK 10's final line, "Til it's really what's asked of me", was originally written as "Til it's really what's asked of we", and I do not remember why I went out of my way to re-record that. Would've worked either way.

• The line "It's a God Thing" in TRACK 12 comes from the title of an actual sermon I heard at my primary childhood church. I remember my dad questioning that phrase during the drive back home, considering it mildly offensive for reasons I cannot even begin to discern. Would that somehow be "taking the lord's name in vain" or something?? Even though it was said by a preacher specifically in the context of the Christian God??? This shit is fucking insufferable, man.

• I'm impressed with my younger self for the mercy on display in TRACK 14's messaging. Funnily enough, I've actually gotten less tolerant of Individual Faith since then; even if just a coping mechanism, there are innumerable other ways for a person to self-soothe that do not require the slippery slope of magical thinking, or the implicit normalization of predatory institutions. I may not be going out of my way to berate You Specifically, but I certainly won't coddle you either. I no longer buy into the idea that anyone needs religion. So honestly, I'd be happy to see "reddit atheism" make a comeback. It just might be necessary at this point, especially when facing the continual rise of christofascism. Treat the whole damn thing as the mind virus that it always was. Make it socially unacceptable. I don't give a fuck anymore.

• The outro sample in TRACK 15 is another specific piece of Christian music that was burned into my brain against my will, once again at the whims of my dad's playlist during car rides. It's some live performance that I think took place at the aforementioned "different church I used to attend".

Also, me saying "congregation, you may be seated" in my final line was referencing the exact thing our pastors would always say after we were done standing up to sing or whatever. I always thought that moment went incredibly hard, but probably only to people who come from the same evangelical background that I do. I don't actually know how universal that specific phrasing is. That's the weird thing about leaving a religion; it can be so hard to tell which elements of it were exclusive to your particular offshoot.