From the album Melodie
This is about someone who's depressed but can't bring themselves to say it out loud. The whole song is questions nobody answers, a person asking strangers (or themselves) to explain what they're experiencing because naming it directly feels impossible. The park walks, the stuck words, the empty tank, the truck breaking down, everything points at the same thing they won't say.
Tell me how I'm supposed to feel / Is this part of the city life?
The narrator outsources their emotional reality to someone else, as if there's a correct answer they're missing. Framing depression as maybe just 'city life' is the song's first dodge, blame geography instead of admitting something's broken inside.
What should I do with this? Am I feeling lazy?
They're describing textbook anhedonia but calling it laziness. The narrator thinks they're asking for advice when they're actually describing symptoms they can't recognize in themselves.
It's sticking on the tip of my tongue / Just floating in an empty tank
The word they can't say is probably 'depressed.' The empty tank reads literal and metaphorical at once, out of gas emotionally, physically, conversationally. That duality does more work than spelling it out would.
Now they're asking if other people perceive what they perceive, which suggests they've stopped trusting their own senses. The truck breaking down mirrors the narrator, but they deflect it outward, easier to diagnose a vehicle than yourself.
First time it's solitary routine. Second time it's an invitation. That small shift from 'walk' to 'stroll' and 'today' to 'with me' might be the narrator reaching for connection, or it might just be the same aimless loop with different words. I'm not sure which.
The song ends exactly where it started, which is the point. No revelation, no breakthrough, just another day of not being able to say what's wrong. The narrator would be shocked to realize they're not actually asking questions, they're describing a crisis in the syntax of small talk.
Slow Pulp's "These Days" depicts someone experiencing depression who cannot voice it directly, instead posing unanswered questions to themselves or others. In Scalpel's line-by-line reading, the song's imagery of park walks, stuck words, an empty tank, and a broken-down truck all gesture toward the same unspoken struggle, with the repeated questioning structure itself becoming a way of circling around what the narrator cannot name outright.
"These Days" by Slow Pulp explores can't name what you're drowning in, asking permission to feel bad, the park as holding pattern, and everything might be breaking down. The central thread is can't name what you're drowning in: The narrator describes every symptom of depression, emptiness, repetition, detachment, but never uses the word, like saying it out loud would make it real. These themes come from Scalpel's line-by-line analysis of the lyrics.
"These Days" by Slow Pulp was released on September 18, 2026 on the album "Melodie". Scalpel's analysis covers the full lyrics of the 2026 release.
Scalpel's line-by-line analysis of "These Days" by Slow Pulp lands here: The song ends exactly where it started, which is the point. No revelation, no breakthrough, just another day of not being able to say what's wrong.