From the album Blood Of Your Empire
This song traps itself in its own lie. The intro screams that nobody's opinion matters except the people who love you, then the verses spend the entire runtime apologizing to exactly those people for being a disappointment. The freedom promised at the top becomes the prison by the chorus. The speaker knows they're lying to themselves about not caring while they're doing it.
If you think I could behave the way you want / Then I must have lied to you enough
This admits the speaker has been faking competence or stability to meet someone's expectations, and the facade is finally breaking. The apology is not for the breakdown itself but for the false hope they gave by pretending they could hold it together in the first place.
Lucid now inside a dream / But I'm reaching out, and no one sees me
The lucidity does not produce escape. The speaker is fully aware they're stuck but that awareness changes nothing, making consciousness worse than sleep. Reaching out without being seen suggests they either can't communicate clearly or the people they're reaching for have already stopped looking.
I'm losing hope, like grinding stones in your hand / I'll just keep on erasing myself into sand
Hope does not disappear suddenly. It gets worn down through repetition until what was solid becomes too fine to hold. The move from stones to sand is irreversible, and the speaker knows it, which is maybe why they frame it as something they'll 'just keep on' doing rather than something they can stop.
Ask yourself, 'Who you are when no one else is watching?'
This doubles back to the intro's nihilism but flips it into an accusation. If nobody's watching, the speaker has no excuse left. They can't blame performance or expectations. Whatever's destroying them is coming from inside, and the bridge forces them to admit it.
The intro's pep talk is the depression talking, trying to isolate the speaker by convincing them nobody cares right before they spiral into needing the people who do. By the end, the question 'Who you are when no one else is watching?' lands like a gut punch because the answer is clearly someone the speaker can't stand to be alone with. The sleepwalking never stops.
Sleepwalker by PRESIDENT sets up a contradiction between its opening promise and its execution, in Scalpel's line-by-line reading. The intro declares that only loved ones' opinions matter, but the verses undercut this by apologizing to those same people for being a disappointment, transforming the song's initial freedom into a kind of self-imposed prison. The speaker performs indifference while simultaneously revealing they care deeply, trapping themselves in a lie they're aware of even as they tell it.
"Sleepwalker" by PRESIDENT explores the ones you trust are the ones you're failing, awareness without agency, apologies for existing wrong, and grinding yourself down slowly. The central thread is the ones you trust are the ones you're failing: The intro insists only loved ones matter, then every verse is consumed with letting those exact people down, creating a feedback loop where care becomes the source of shame. These themes come from Scalpel's line-by-line analysis of the lyrics.
"Sleepwalker" by PRESIDENT was released on September 4, 2026 on the album "Blood Of Your Empire". Scalpel's analysis covers the full lyrics of the 2026 release.
Scalpel's line-by-line analysis of "Sleepwalker" by PRESIDENT lands here: The intro's pep talk is the depression talking, trying to isolate the speaker by convincing them nobody cares right before they spiral into needing the people who do. By the end, the question 'Who you are when no one else is watching?'