"Actual life 2 (February 2 - October 15 2021)" - Fred again..

As I’m sitting here, the very seconds after listening through the album, I still feel the goosebumps slowly fading away from my skin.

A perfect journey through ups and downs. Using fragments of everyday conversations as the narrative is something we often see in music, but this album feels nothing like anything I’ve ever seen.

Listening to this, a part of me wants to be in a big crowd jumping up and down while the music is blasting through the speakers. Another part wants to ride my bike down an empty street at dawn, before the world decides to wake up, with this album plugged into my ears. Both ways seems right. I often find it the other way around, when listening to albums in general. Either you want to scream out the words from the top of your lungs, or you want to be surrounded by nothing but silence. In that sense it becomes clear how different Actual life 2 (February 2 - October 15 2021) is from the rest of the music today. The only title that comes to mind, when thinking about albums that bring me the same feeling, is WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? By Billie Eilish. This could be played in front of a thousand people, and played under the covers in a dark bedroom, and work both ways.

Whenever finding something rare it only really takes a split second before the entire world knows about it too. Nothing so amazing can go unnoticed. That is the destiny of true talent. It is very clear that it’s the case here. I had never heard of this guy until I was told by someone to check him out. Chances are that that person telling me found out about this guy the exact same way. I’m not a mathematician, but a friend telling a friend, telling a friend, telling a friend adds up. If this album wasn’t so great, would I even have been told about him? Would the friend that told me have been told by whoever told him?

The most streamed song on the album is Billie (Loving Arms), which he released as a stand-alone single before dropping the album. With nearly six million streams this song distances itself massively from the rest of the tracks on the album. Tracks that on average have reached only 200k streams each. At first I was a bit confused as to why the rest hadn’t received more streams, as I found Cathrin (The City), Roze (Forgive) and Mollie (Hear Your Name) much better than the lead-single. Then I looked at the release date. November 19th 2021. Two weeks ago! This just adds to my point of Fred Gibson being a pure musical genius.

Making my way back to the second-to-last track on the album, Mollie (Hear Your Name). If you ask me, this is one of the top three songs on the album, but I understand why he didn’t make this a single of its own. With a sound that differentiates a lot from the other songs on the album, it would have been a misleading example of the overall album. You can tell Fred Again knows his current spot in the industry by choosing the more or less predictable lead-single, and not the “niche” song that wouldn’t have attracted the target-audience.

No matter if you are the type to blast out country songs while driving, or sing along to old school rap in the shower, I think Actual life 2 (February 2 - October 15 2021) has something appealing to offer. You cannot deny the talent and obvious hours of work that has been put into this project, even when what meets the eye might seem messy, weird or random, you will often find the things that seem the most random, to be the things that are planned out the most.

One of the most magical things about music is, when it travels beyond genres, styles and phrases like "what I normally listen to”, and just turns into a beautiful existence.