the shape of someone.
Rather than decide what happened or how it should be remembered, the song leaves those contradictions unresolved. The distinction between the person remembering and the person being remembered is never entirely clear.
The closing lines abandon the narrator’s exaggerated confidence for a much simpler admission: “I remember wanting to stay / I remember wanting to leave / I don’t remember which came first.”
Marine imagery turns the human body into something strange, vulnerable, and seemingly capable of surviving anything. Beneath the humour is a quieter examination of memory, identity, and the complicated relationship between wanting an experience and understanding it afterward.
The title deliberately leaves its own sentence unfinished: someone I used to know, someone I used to love, or perhaps someone I used to be.
What initially resembles an unusually explicit love song gradually becomes something less certain. Affection and degradation exist almost interchangeably, while the narrator moves between desire, cruelty, humour, and occasional glimpses of recognition.
“sum1 i used 2” pairs delicate acoustic instrumentation and an almost tender vocal performance with grotesque sexual imagery, religious symbolism, and the recurring absurdity of Damian’s deep-sea mythology.
Someone I used to know, love—or be.
One question heading is shortened for the website.
On recognizing someone
Sometimes you recognize someone before you realize what you’re recognizing.
Is the song about wanting something or regretting it?
I don’t think those are always opposites. Sometimes remembering that you wanted something is the part that’s hardest to make sense of.