Microwave writes songs where you realize mid-track the narrator is the villain.
What is Microwave's music about?
Nathan Hardy builds entire songs around the moment you realize you're the problem you've been describing. The structure is the point. These aren't confessions that start from self-awareness. They're the process of getting there, which makes them worse to sit through and harder to dismiss. 'The Devil and I' spends three minutes hunting for someone to blame before landing on the realization that there's no one else in the room. Just the narrator and his reflection. By the time you understand what you're actually hearing, you're complicit too.
What themes does Microwave write about?
The problem was me the whole time — 'The Devil and I' spends the entire runtime screaming at an external villain before the final admission that there's no one else to blame. 'Bright' never says drunk driving directly until it's too late to mishear it. The misdirection isn't a trick. It's how denial actually works. Hardy withholds the actual subject until the song forces you to reinterpret everything that came before.
Being broke means you're unlovable — Material poverty shows up as moral evidence, not just circumstance. Abandoned leases, sleeping in cars, skipped meals get treated as proof the narrator doesn't deserve the relationship he's in. Leaving town mid-lease in 'I-70' isn't financial instability. It's another wrong thing on a list of wrong things. Hardy has talked about writing from his early twenties instability, and you can hear him using his own economic failure as a bludgeon against himself.
Watching someone destroy themselves makes you responsible — This is the Mitch Hedberg joke about escalators: they can never break, they can only become stairs. Except here, staying near someone's collapse doesn't just make you a witness. It makes you part of the wreckage. 'Stovall' moves from finding someone passed out to sleeping with them on the same floor. 'Whimper' knows exactly what it is but shows up anyway, treating self-awareness as worse than ignorance because now you can't even pretend you didn't know better.
Running away just brings the problem with you — Every geographic escape gets undercut by showing the narrator is the thing he's trying to leave behind. 'I-70' claims conquest and peace in one breath, then admits to doing all the wrong things in the next. The car breaking down in 'Kansas' at exactly the right moment isn't luck. It's the universe saying you were never going to make it out anyway, so here's someone else to drag into it.
Clichés are where honesty goes to die — Characters speak in borrowed language when they can't say what they actually mean, and Hardy uses those platitudes to show emotional bankruptcy. The corkboard full of motivational quotes in 'Work It Out' becomes the symbol of everything hollow. By the end, the narrator throws the same language back as justification for leaving. Sunday school promises in 'Mansion in the Sky' get clung to not as belief but as the only available script for hope when you have nothing else.
What makes Microwave's writing unique?
What makes Hardy's writing stick is that the self-awareness never fixes anything. The songs document the process of realizing you're the problem, but that realization doesn't stop the behavior. It just makes you more aware of what you're doing while you keep doing it. By the later songs, he's not even pretending the recognition matters. He's just watching, cataloging, asking questions about other people's collapses because maybe that's easier than looking at his own. The best line he's written might be the simplest: 'Just the Devil and I.' Two people, same person.