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. End of Everything is a treacherous expression. On the record’s second track, “The Clown,” Birgy sings, “psychic waste I’ve absorbed / is collapsing, again.” At once an apocalyptic end, but also making space for new possibilities. This practice of hopeful speculation, of world-building, is paired with an inner darkness. How to encompass “all and everything,” Birgy questions on the record’s fifth track – how to dance in this burning world, how to wail and grind and surrender, how to share energy as well as learned tools. On the album opener “Cactus People,” our narrator digs her claws into the mud as she is torn from her beloved; “the grass and all its snaky tongues try to pull you in / I say let them win,” Birgy intones while surrendering to torturous abandonment. What might feel like an elegy to Planet Earth suddenly speeds up into a frenetic chorus. Not a call to party among society’s ashes, but acknowledging that we can exist in the face of catastrophe. Amid some of the album’s dark depths, there are profound moments of celebration. “Love Is” was written by songwriter Austin Jackson of the Flagstaff jazz-punk band, Dragons. The song’s call connects Birgy to her time living in Flagstaff, where she recommitted to a matrilineal magical practice with a community of musical witches. An untamed occult practice is important to Birgy and her co-conspirators, and the powers cultivated and explored surge through End of Everything. For the past ten years, Birgy and her evolving community of collaborators have been crafting poetic, musical odes to the pain and glory of human existence. Born and raised in various small, haunted rodeo towns out West, Birgy eventually ran away to Olympia, Washington, where she forged the first iteration of Mega Bog. The band wandered the country performing and recording, fusing together twisted genres. End of Everything was executed at Tropico Beauty in Glendale, California. The album was recorded with James Krivchenia (Big Thief) who co-produced the record with Birgy and played drums, bringing his rhythmic mastery and wild percussive spirit. Krivchenia also mixed the record and co-engineered with Tropico’s steward, Phil Hartunian. The album's fantastical textures and heavy polyphony owe a great deal to synthesizer maestro and pianist Aaron Otheim (Heatwarmer) who helped actualize the imaginings Birgy could only physically sing. His classical twists, avant-harmony, leads and glissandos hold a huge presence throughout. Zach Burba (Zacy’s, iji, Dear Nora), one of the founding members of Mega Bog, plays bass guitar, bringing intuitive counter melodies to the new Bog-scape. Will Segerstrom, Meg Duffy