The first track was about pretending. The second is about what happens when the pretending stops working and still nobody notices the difference.
“Unheard in the Silence” is the loudest lyric in the first half of the record. And the loneliest.
A Gaze That Goes Straight Through
The first verse: “Their eyes pass right through me, like I’m just a lie.”
Not looking down on him, not judging him. Passing straight through. There is no worse kind of look, because judgment at least assumes somebody is there.
The second verse has the same thing in another form: “They speak past my soul, like I’m less than a ghost.” A ghost at least gets to haunt.
Eight Times “Scream”
The word “scream” appears eight times in this lyric. “I’m screaming my truth, but it’s lost in their haze.”
The pre-chorus raises the stakes: “But I’ll scream even louder, I won’t be ignored.” The chorus adds: “I’ll scream through their walls.”
This track does not describe anger. It is anger. The trouble is that a scream nobody hears changes nothing outside — it only changes the one who is screaming.
A Silence Somebody Gives
The most interesting words are in the outro: “From the silence they gave me.”
Gave. Silence here is not an absence of conversation but something handed over. A deliberate answer. Anyone who has ever been brushed off with silence knows it is a message, and a very clear one.
The third verse completes the picture: “Their hearts are a fortress, no room for my care.”
A Hint of What Comes Five Tracks Later
This scream is worth remembering, because in track seven the record turns it around. There, one line is enough: “Your whisper breaks the lonely night.”
Here the scream gets through nothing across three verses. There the whisper gets through at once. The difference is not volume. It is whether somebody on the other side is listening.
For now there is the outro: “through the dark I will climb.” After the crawling of track one it is a small shift. But an upward one.
You can hear the track on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music.
In the next post I will write about “Cage of Tangled Lies” — about a cage built out of promises.
Thank you for being here.
Adam Smentoch Creator of the Dust Anthem project
