love_em_
brainless.

“love_em_brainless” is a song by damian michaels, produced by unseen sea, blending surreal ocean imagery, dark humour, desire, and grief into a love song that becomes considerably less certain of itself as it unfolds.

Beneath its playful language and increasingly questionable marine biology lies a story of loss, longing, and the strange things people reach for when they’re trying not to feel something. Catboys, squid, nautical gods, and biblical references inhabit an underwater world where affection and absurdity coexist with something much harder to confront.

The song’s recurring invitation to love someone brainless or blind carries several possible meanings. What initially sounds like an irreverent celebration of attraction can also suggest a desire to escape understanding altogether. Sometimes not thinking feels easier than remembering. Sometimes being wanted feels close enough to being loved. And sometimes the distinction only becomes apparent after something has already been lost.

Throughout the song, tenderness and objectification sit uncomfortably close together. The narrator moves between admiration, teasing, possession, and genuine need, often describing the person at the centre of the song through imagery that is as affectionate as it is ridiculous. Yet beneath the exaggeration is a quieter question of whether anyone involved is seeing the other person clearly.

As the song progresses, its playful underwater world begins to feel increasingly distant. The sudden admission of loss reframes earlier descriptions, transforming what once seemed like flirtatious details into fragments of something remembered. The ocean becomes not only a place of fantasy and desire, but also a vast separation between what was wanted, what was understood, and what remains.

By the outro, even the narrator’s certainty has begun to unravel. Earlier declarations return with small but significant changes, leaving room to question whether the song was ever entirely about the person being desired, or also about the person doing the desiring.

One of Damian’s earliest releases, “love_em_brainless” introduces many of the contradictions that continue throughout his later work: sacred imagery beside shameless humour, affection tangled with self-destruction, and songs that seem perfectly comfortable being ridiculous until suddenly they aren’t.

For all its underwater absurdity, the song leaves behind something quite human: the possibility that loving someone brainlessly isn’t always about refusing to see them.

Sometimes it’s about not knowing how to look at what’s left.