'Cavity', in contrast, reacts to the same subject matter with a sense of vulnerability rather than anger. Listeners are led to a false sense of security with the deceptive instrumentals on this track: softly droning steel guitars float over a bed of a strummed acoustic and a warm piano. The imagery of filth and rot, however, stays the constant element: “I’ll eat your shit till it rots but I won’t be the one to wear your silver crown”. A smooth saxophone trades lines and mingles with a warm fuzzy guitar—the dissonant resonance hiding Seabird’s lyrics in plain sight. As much as there exists intimate vocal mixing on this album, there also exists tracks that flood the vocals with a wave of textures, exposing Seabird’s diverse influences in folk and shoegaze.

Their knack for grimy, almost industrial soundscapes is no better exemplified in the album’s emotional peak: ‘Dirge’. The most explicit dedication to the album's subject matter, 'Dirge' offers a purging of the grief that comes with death, sonically and lyrically. A loose, unwieldy guitar riff stutters along the length of the track, while Seabird’s vocals mimic its movement: “I don’t know if I believe in god/I don’t know if I know how to go on” they mourn. The track is sparse with lyrics but is defiantly poignant with the three short stanzas it offers. Halfway into the track, guitars take center stage as a lengthy instrumental roars. The introductory riff devolves into distortion-drenched sirens, like the wail of the friction between two steel beams. The instrumental evokes its own kind of imagery: the cathartic shriek of a person mourning a grave loss.

Seabird’s influences have never been as clear as in ‘Waste’, the penultimate track of the album that contributes to a 12-minute closer. Reminiscent of tracks by shoegaze bands Slowdive and contemporaries Wednesday, Seabird employs big-room, reverberating soundscapes, evoking the isolation that comes with loss. The track is exclusively sung in the second and third person Seabird becomes a ghost herself, experiencing their grief in a dissociative state, distancing themselves from what once was a personal affair in ‘Dirge’. The lyrics themselves play into this feeling of isolation: “All of the waste is just left to sit and rot”, they sing, forcing the potent lines out of breathless lungs. This shoegaze/ noise influence becomes salient as a screeching instrumental leads to the track’s end; guitars feedbacking, and dissonant riffs shrieking.

Tucked between these cathartic releases of grief and sorrow are beautiful and unabashedly naive confessions, similarly, about loss. “Grace” is undoubtedly the most sonically accessible entry by Seabird. Carried by a spry 4-beat groove and a playful piano riff, the accompaniments reflect the childish obsession Seabird develops for Grace, the mature, and idolized subject of the track. Delivered from the view of a 16-year-old, Seabird observes a relatable pattern in youth where envy is tangled with love and idolization. The song that follows, “Twenty”, wistfully reminisces these times of naivety across the threshold of the young adult. Now 20 years old, Seabird sings “Time’s moving too fast/I wish I could catch it like a firefly  and keep it in a glass”. The loss of youth is central to the two-track run, though this loss is treated with a sense of levity compared to the darker subjects that appear later in the album.

In “The end of the beginning”, the album’s last track, Seabird’s voice is engulfed in a whirring waltz groove. A lament to all of the loss, Seabird tries to see the beauty in saying goodbye. In a bashful mumble, barely discernible, they sing: “Things will all be good in time/You’ll forget you ever loved me”. In contrast to the galvanizing outros to previous tracks, “The end of the beginning” fades into silence. A subdued droning screech can be heard reverberating in the background: a subtle reference to all of the purging that has now turned to acceptance.

A relieving ode to grief, love, and youth, “Alas,” channels the unbearably raw moments of loss into a concentrated, introspective portfolio. It is a dedication to two polarized, but interconnected concepts: relief and beauty, grief and rot.