under the surface.

damian michaels writes songs in which love, devotion, desire, grief and absurdity are rarely separate experiences.

A Vancouver-based indie-pop artist, Damian draws from deep-sea biology, religious iconography, digital culture and the strange emotional logic of boys who want to be loved but don't always know what being loved is supposed to look like.

Cuttlefish, anglerfish, siphonophores and other unfamiliar organisms reappear as lovers, gods, predators or versions of the narrator himself. They aren't only scenery: gills suggest survival and dependence, pressure becomes longing, and the abyss can mean loneliness, intimacy or somewhere that finally feels like home.

Angels, saints, baptism and sacramental language become tangled with physical intimacy and ordinary human need. Another person can become an object of worship; the gods themselves are beautiful, flawed, ridiculous and often incapable of saving anyone.

the joke has a pulse.

Almost biblical passages can suddenly collapse into internet slang, affectionate nonsense or something embarrassingly juvenile. That collision isn't a distraction from the serious material. Often, it's how the narrator can bear to approach it. The same joke can sound very different by the end of a song.

Under the surrealism, the songs keep moving between being desired and being understood, wanting control and deciding to let it go. A narrator can sound certain of the rules right up until the rules change.

Memories are distorted, responsibility is sometimes unclear, and darker stories tend to reveal themselves in fragments rather than explanations. The listener is left to distinguish what happened, what was remembered and what the narrator can bring himself to acknowledge.

But describing the music only through darkness would miss its character. There's genuine delight in the strange creatures, beautiful boys, ridiculous declarations and simple pleasure of being alive and drawn toward someone. When a song ends in loss, its earlier joy isn't necessarily revealed to have been false.

Musically, the same contrasts appear in boyish vocal twang, melodic repetition, chant-like hooks, dense fast phrasing and arrangements that move between intimate guitar-led pop, lush atmospheres and more playful dance sounds.