Allegories Drift Into the Ether on “Baker’s Lung”

Experimental indie-electronic duo Allegories return with “Baker’s Lung,” a dense, shimmering sound sculpture that builds upon the foundation of a simple ukulele sketch. It’s the latest in their ongoing exploration of transforming small musical ideas into grand, textured statements — songs that teeter between melancholy and euphoria, contemplation and release. Plush, spacey, and intricately layered, “Baker’s Lung” reveals a band deeply attuned to the emotional undercurrents beneath modern existence.

At its core, the song is about reckoning — with purpose, with time, and with the gnawing sense that even as we construct lives of meaning, they might still crumble under their own weight. “As you imagine the future, how do you build when the foundation of what you thought mattered no longer fills that space?” the duo asks in their notes on the track. “What do you do when your time is consumed by the hours of a career? Can you just contemplate and die? Or can you follow the breadcrumbs to fulfillment, maybe even enlightenment? Probably not, but worth asking. And worth trying.

Even if the ‘Baker’s Lung’ is probably going to end you.”

It’s the kind of existential questioning that has defined Allegories since their earliest experiments. The pair first emerged out of Hamilton’s creative scene in the mid-2010s, blending fractured electronic textures with indie-pop sensibilities. What began as a side project soon became a lab for ideas — a space where disparate influences could collide: IDM, shoegaze, house, ambient, and even noise. But “Baker’s Lung” pushes further, blurring structure and atmosphere until they become inseparable.

The song began as a ukulele progression paired with a vocal line — fragile, unassuming, and small enough to fit in a bedroom recording. From there, Allegories dismantled it completely. “‘Baker’s Lung’ started from a ukulele sketch with vocals. Allegories took that progression, moved it in new directions, and abandoned the original – a fun exercise where you have a map, but you have to burn it to get to the right location,” they explain. What’s left feels both intimate and cosmic — the echo of something human filtered through the circuitry of modern production.

There’s a slow-motion elegance to the track, a weightless drift that builds like a dream barely remembered. Synthetic percussion pulses just beneath the surface, while layers of vocals and keys shimmer above it, flickering in and out of focus. The duo’s strength lies not just in technical precision but in emotional translation — the way they can stretch a single idea until it becomes something that feels infinite.

And then there are the words:

I used to be a mountain filled with boxes of wants

Now I’m waiting on clues

A simple verse, but one that distills the song’s heart — the surrender of certainty, the quiet hope that meaning can still be found in fragments.

In many ways, “Baker’s Lung” feels like the spiritual continuation of Allegories’ evolution. The duo began as a self-proclaimed “experimental noise project,” and over the years have refined their instincts into something sharper, more melodic, yet no less strange. Their music still operates in that liminal space between dance floor release and introspective drift — what they once called the “over/underground spectrum.” It’s a world where pop is reimagined through texture and emotion, where hooks dissolve into haze and rhythm becomes a form of reflection.

Listening to “Baker’s Lung” feels like walking into an empty cathedral of sound — reverent, echoing, filled with both beauty and unease. It’s not background music; it’s a slow unspooling of thought, an invitation to consider what remains when ambition, routine, and ego fall away.

For Allegories, that’s the point. To keep building, keep erasing, and keep finding new ground between clarity and chaos. “Baker’s Lung” may never answer the questions it poses, but maybe that’s its quiet triumph: it’s content to live inside the asking.