yeah neon is the only album to my understanding that they feel like didnt meet their initial vision for the record. part of it is also jt and jesse didnt know how to write with each other yet so they had a lot of personal kinks to iron out the songs i love the most on that are breach, ghost of nothing, unify and expiate. valhalla is also super killer
It’s kind of astonishing how good Breach turned out to be since I heard somewhere that when Jesse first wrote the song, it sounded a lot like Doomsday before it came out and once Architects dropped that song he had to scramble and rewrite Breach. Plus JT got sick while recording the vocals and they had to record 7 of the songs in Alex’s bedroom (JT mentioned this on his stream once, he doesn’t remember which songs though).
Circling back to this, Signal Fire is the best Neon has to offer the listener. The guitar work is gorgeous, the lyrics are emotional and relatable (plus they allude to The Great Gatsby which is nice), vocals are on point from both Jesse and JT. Just a shame about the mix. And on the new album front, frankly I think it's fucked up that there's some Russian guy out there that knows what the deal with the album is and I don't lol
My favorites on that one are probably Monolith, Valhalla and Hyperreality. Some of the catchiest hooks they ever came up with. Guess it's more of a frontloaded record for me then.
hyperreality is a pretty dope song too, super catchy hook on that and i love its solo monolith and disarray are the only two erra songs im not terribly into and even then theyre still alright. this band is so insane