About this item

End of Everything is the intrepid seventh album from Mega Bog, a nightmarish experimental pop ensemble led by Erin Elizabeth Birgy. In 2020, Birgy was surrounded by seemingly endless turmoil: mass death, a burning planet, and a personal reckoning when past traumas met fresh ones. Living in Los Angeles, against the backdrop of brilliantly horrifying forest fires, she questioned what perspective to use moving forward in such dumbfounded awe. Deciding to seize something tangible, she produced a record that spoke of surrender, of mourning, and support in the face of tumultuous self-reflection.

Writing on piano and synthesizer, instead of the familiar guitar, Birgy explored a spectrum of new sounds to illuminate a state of volatility and flux that was both universal and personal. Speaking of this transition, she describes the need “to feel… instantly. I didn’t want to dig into secret codes. I no longer wanted to hide behind difficult music. I was curious to give others the same with the music I create; to make music someone could use to explore drama, playfulness, and dancing, to shake the trauma loose.” Heavy grooves, metal guitar squeals, Italo disco bass lines, rhapsodic synth layers, and huge choruses stomp around the delightfully sanguine pop drama. Where previous records stretched out into the abstract and ethereal, End of Everything delivers a hit straight to collective awareness and healing.

A seemingly disparate jukebox of sounds – ranging from Thin Lizzy, Bronski Beat, Franco Battiato and Ozzy Osbourne to 90’s house classics like Haddaway’s ‘What is Love’ and Corona's ‘Rhythm of the Night’ - foregrounded a new punchy theatricality in Birgy’s music. The songs she was creating at home followed suit with bolder hooks and more dancefloor energy than she’d ever dared before.

While an ecological narrative is clear with songs like “Anthropocene” lamenting a blazing atmosphere—“City skies turn black in the daytime / I see a burnt up alligator / What the fuck?”—End of Everything is an incredibly personal record, charting a journey through Birgy’s own psyche. Midway through producing the record, Birgy made the personally necessary choice to get sober and work through stored debilitating experiences that had begun affecting her ability to communicate creatively.

Thrilling melodies grow to ascend throughout the length of a song, clutching your hand and whispering in your ear one minute before screaming off a cliff edge the next. The soft and the guttural nuzzle and crash of heads, where every moment holds the multitudes of all possible dimensions stirring each other through the veil.

TRACK LISTING

1. Cactus People
2. The Clown
3. Love Is
4. Don't Doom Me, Now
5. All And Everything
6. Anthropocene
7. Complete Book Of Roses
8. End Of Everything