Bad Advice: the world starts writing songs

With Bad Advice the question changed from "can we turn songs into a coherent artist?" to "can the world we built produce new songs?"

The record moved from romance and restless youth to dating, smartphones, codes, bravado and bad decisions. The working premise: we have never had so many ways to signal desire, and may never have been worse at saying what we want. Twelve tracks followed from that, including Press Cherry to Start, Red Flag, Green Light, Soft Launch, No Reception, Delete My Number and Goodnight, Bad Idea. The titles share one view of people rather than one typeface. A recurring phrase, "hang your halo on the handle", was planted across several songs as a piece of internal mythology.

The songs were allowed to be more sexual; the visuals were not made more explicit. Image models drift towards an average idea of "sexy" that looks expensive and says nothing. Prompts were rewritten as micro-scenes: not "sensual afterparty" but a keycard slid under a folded napkin as someone leans in; not "digital dating" but a phone turned face down and a hand taking its place. The more specific the human action, the less the image looked generated.

The cherry from Press Cherry to Start ran through lyric, cover, video and album identity. It also broke the metadata: entered as "Press 🍒 to Start", one system cut the title at the emoji, leaving "Press". Official metadata now reads Press Cherry to Start; the emoji stays in artwork and promotion.

The cover went through several rounds. Early versions held too many ideas (coffee, hotel key, sunglasses, receipts, slogans). When generating is cheap, adding feels free; attention is not. Later versions cut back: a larger cherry, the phone, a broken neon ring on the ground reading as a fallen halo, the figure turned away. NEON SHELTER was enlarged, because it was too subtle at Spotify thumbnail size, which produced the two-line name mark with a broken ring in the O.