(i thought you made a) promise is cope’s most refined work yet. Encapsulating a forlorn and bittersweet resent that many people go through after a messy breakup. It’s a love song that won’t accept it’s a love song, making you feel every blow he takes, with his heavy hitting vocals making you fall to your knees in sync to his brakence-esque production – these are lyrics you feel in your core.
The unpredictable key switch and unconventional structure hinting at cope’s heylog influence, he completes the song with longing vocal tone and emotion that sets him aside from any artist in your playlist, while still wearing his influences on his sleeve. This theme of keeping the listener on their toes continues with his use of sampling, as keen ears can spot Nemo and Willem Dafoe between verses. We are even more surprised when ‘i thought you made a) promise’ delivers cope in his first real instance of RAPPING, after the beat change switching seamlessly to an aggressive shouty tone. Lines like “you say I’m boring? well entice me ‘cause I’m losing interest” show us a completely flipped personality of what we’re used to from the solemn, doting cope we are accustomed to hearing over the simpler acoustic instrumentals – this new alt-cope brings us a different energy, not quite a cliché ‘bad-boy’ character, but more someone corrupted by the sourness of a messy breakup, more bitter and less caring as before. This comes across as cope’s own slim shady effect, a more fictional, potential disposition he could perceive himself becoming in a different world.
As usual, cope shows off his talent for building a piece of music from the ground up – with everything save the cover art done entirely on his own, writing, production, and engineering. While this kind of admirable independency puts him into the bedroom-pop category, would would argue that he is far from that pocket sonically, his previous works being more folky singer-songwriter pieces that evolved into very anti-pop, hyperpop leaning titles as his shyness to wear his influences in his own work subsided. Cope is grounded through all the glitches and distortion by his acoustic background, aiding to set him apart from his contemporaries and idols with a more layered, bright and polished production, cope simply adds onto his existing sound, rather than ‘switching up’ altogether.
(i thought you made a) promise is now available to stream and download on all platforms.
