by Elizabeth Braaten (@elizabethbwords)
Where do you go when it feels like everything is ending? Mega Bog confronts that idea on her experimental-pop album End of Everything, a project that dares to take an undaunted look at all things daunting. End of Everything is a genre-bending, thunderous trip, defined by explosive choruses, blood-pumping Italo disco bass lines, and songwriting that packs a punch.
Mega Bog is the musical moniker of lead singer and songwriter Erin Elizabeth Birgy. Birgy has been releasing music as Mega Bog for almost a decade, during which she’s grown her vision into an ensemble. In that time, Birgy has added members to the collective from bands like Big Thief, iji, Big Eater, Causings, Hand Habits, Heatwarmer, and more. Birgy, a Pacific Northwest-grown songwriter with a flare for the mystical and unknown, remains the heart of Mega Bog. A self-described rodeo child who was allegedly cursed upon conception, her endless curiosity repeatedly dares her to venture into the strange and unpredictable.
Sometimes, that means looking into the deepest parts of oneself. End of Everything, Mega Bog’s sixth album, sees Birgy coming face to face with her own baggage, the volatility of modernity, and how the two interact with one another. Birgy, who made the choice to get sober while working on the record, has disclosed that the album was inspired by both personal trauma as well as the seemingly endless ecological nightmare we’re living through. Observing a constant doom cycle of mass casualties and natural disasters (she resides in Los Angeles, which has recently been plagued by devastating forest fires) while also coping with personal tragedy, the songwriter found herself wondering how to move forward and heal. So she crafted an album that acknowledges the modern human experience, when every day feels like it just might be the end of everything. The record speaks of surrender, of mourning, of self-reflection — and how one can exist while also staring into the gaping abyss.
Darkness, whether it be personal or global, is a continuous theme on End of Everything. The album opener, “Cactus People,” is an emotional surrender, with Birgy begging a lover not to abandon her, singing “The grass and all its snaky tongues try to pull you in/I say, let them win.” On “The Clown,” the record’s standout track, she is intimate and vulnerable, describing how the “psychic waste I’ve absorbed is collapsing, again” before asking “so, how do you see me, now? Am I still that clown you found charming?” Meanwhile, songs like “Anthropocene,” with its blunt ecological, apocalyptic imagery (“City skies turn black in the daytime/I see a burnt up alligator/What the fuck?”) speak to the constant environmental turmoil 21st century humanity bears witness to.
End of Everything was recorded at Tropico Beauty in Glendale, California, and is accompanied by The Practice of Hell Ending, which is Birgy’s first published collection of poetry. The album is deeply personal, altruistically global, and just a straight up, good listen. It’s a bold piece of work — one that dares to acknowledge that we are human, even when the sky is falling.