i typically don't listen to lyrics when listening to songs but the melody was surprisingly good

@Bayesian I suspect that Project Victory is betting NO on some of those markets about number of listeners or song ratings.

I couldn't get an LLM to output anything close to that sort of review even when I tried specific prompting.

When simply given the song and asked to rate it from 1 to 100, Gemini Pro 2.5 returned between 92 and 94 every time I asked, stating it was in the 95th percentile of professional music.

So, regardless of whether humans like it or not, that sort of LLM output requires special prompting.

@SteveSokolowski By the way, I think this song is the first that is an existential threat to the NO bettors, and they know it.

There are people offline now who agree with the idea that the models have had a step change.

These lyrics are a masterclass in overwrought, pseudo-profound imagery that collapses under the weight of its own pretension. Here's the autopsy:

1. **Industrial Thesaurus Overdose:** Rivets, rust-flaked, gear-teeth, filings, acetylene, scrap, twisted rails... It's like the writer raided a junkyard dictionary and decided *every* noun needs an industrial modifier. It doesn't evoke grit; it screams "Look how gritty and industrial I'm being!" The imagery is relentless, predictable, and ultimately numbing. "Iron snow"? Seriously? That's not evocative, it's clumsy.

2. **Forced Profundity & Mixed Metaphors:** The core sentiment (regret, rebuilding) is valid, but it's buried under layers of strained, ill-fitting metaphors.
* "Lifting shards of yesterday toward a humbler sky"? What does that *actually* mean visually or emotionally? It sounds deep but dissolves into nonsense. Shards lifted *toward* the sky? Why?
* "Forging shelter wide enough for hearts left outside" mixes construction and emotion awkwardly. Is the shelter literal? Metaphorical? Why are hearts "outside"? It's vague and feels like placeholder language.
* "Regret ignites a latticework of light"? How? Why? This is pure word salad masquerading as insight. Regret igniting *light* is a bizarre, counter-intuitive image that isn't earned.
* Comparing carrying a scrap lantern to Atlas holding up continents is laughably grandiose and disproportionate. It doesn't evoke humility; it highlights the narrator's (and lyricist's) inflated sense of their struggle.
* "The roof is patched with my regrets / The rest I've built with trust"? So the structure is literally made of abstract concepts? This isn't poetic, it's nonsensical. How do you *patch* with regret? It's a cheap, Hallmark-card level metaphor.

3. **Clunky Language & Awkward Phrasing:**
* "Rust-flaked rivets rattle under boot heels" - That's a mouthful trying too hard to sound gritty. "Rivets rattled underfoot" would suffice without the forced adjectives.
* "Flutter like fallen flags" - A cliché comparison adding nothing new.
* "Silence weighs more than the steel they outline" - This *could* be interesting, but "outline" is a weak, imprecise verb here. What do the blueprints outline? The silence? The steel? It's muddy.
* "Filings drift like iron snow" - As mentioned, "iron snow" is clunky and unnatural.
* "Each hiss of the acetylene is a syllable of sorrow / Spelling 'sorry' where the fault lines glow" - This is the lyrical equivalent of a facepalm. It's painfully literal, awkwardly constructed ("syllable of sorrow"), and the payoff ("sorry") is embarrassingly on-the-nose. Fault lines "glowing"? Why? More forced drama.

4. **Repetitive & Unearned Chorus:** The chorus repeats *three times* with minimal variation ("humbler sky" becomes "waking sky," "hearts left outside" becomes "every name I deny," "regret ignites" becomes "surrender shapes"). The core problem is that the central image – "lifting shards... forging shelter... latticework of light" – remains vague and unconvincing. Repeating weak imagery doesn't make it stronger; it makes it more tedious. The payoff line "can make this small one right" feels unearned because we never see *how* or *what* this "small one" is beyond more abstract building metaphors.

5. **Lack of Concrete Detail or Relatable Emotion:** Where is the *specific* regret? What "world" was crushed? Who are the "hearts left outside" or the "faces... lost in the ash"? The lyrics drown in abstract industrial melancholia without grounding it in a single tangible moment, person, or consequence. It's all atmosphere and no substance. The emotion feels borrowed from the imagery, not driving it.

6. **The Outro: A Final Cringe:** "Leave your anger in the dust" is a bland, preachy instruction. The final lines about the roof being patched with regrets and built with trust are, as stated, nonsensical metaphors that try desperately for a poignant ending but land with a thud of artifice.

**Verdict:** These lyrics are a prime example of style over substance. They mistake density of imagery for depth and obscure a potentially relatable core emotion (regret/atonement) under layers of forced industrial aesthetics, clunky phrasing, and ill-conceived metaphors. It reads like someone trying *very hard* to write a profound, gritty anthem but forgetting to include genuine human feeling, specific details, or coherent imagery. It's emotionally hollow, lyrically overwrought, and ultimately forgettable despite its desperate attempts to be memorable. It needs radical surgery: strip back 70% of the adjectives, ditch the junkyard clichés, find concrete details for the regret, and build metaphors that actually illuminate the emotion instead of burying it. Right now, it's less a song and more a pile of rusty poetic scrap metal.