Photo courtesy of RX

Singer/songwriter RX pours a conflicted heart into his new single “Misery,” which describes the agony of someone unable to leave a toxic relationship. The song begins with delicate guitar plucks and soft crooning and then crescendos to a chorus that contrasts punchy drum beats with elongated vocal notes. Lyrics that describe feelings of entrapment and deception give rise to a desperate plea for the strength to walk away, but this cry for help is immediately countered with the delusion that the relationship is all the narrator has.

As the song continues, a pattern becomes clear: despite the singer’s recognition of the relationship’s unhealthy nature, he can’t bring himself to break the vicious cycle he’s become accustomed to. The lyric “but I think I like the pain of being in misery” epitomizes this inner turmoil best, as the singer seems to have acquiesced in his decision to remain in the tormenting predicament.

In the “Misery” music video, the toxic relationship takes the form of a black-and-white cartoon, as two characters – an ordinary man and a triangular blob – engage in a series of tumultuous encounters. The interactions begin innocently enough, but the blob, whose ambiguous depiction may come to signify a lack of morality, soon becomes abusive toward the man. The blob continually causes physical harm to the man, only to use emotional deception to win him back. Despite the mistreatment, the characters continue to interact, and the abused, although he begins to display signs of frustration, remains in the relationship. It’s not until the video’s final moments that we see the abused confront his tormentor; and, as the screen fades to black, the two characters angrily look each other in the eye, almost as if they’re truly seeing each other for the first time.

RX’s “Misery” tackles an almost unanswerable question: why do we stay? Although the singer is able to recognize the pain he’s putting himself through, he can’t seem to reconcile this mistreatment with the person who is inflicting it. The song does a beautiful job of matching waves of emotion felt by the singer to fluctuations in tonality, and it successfully forces listeners to empathize with the singer’s heartache. What “Misery” excels most at, however, is maintaining a consistent balance between the enunciation and emotion of the lyrics and the sounds of soft guitar plucks and thumping drum beats. Everything works together harmoniously in a way that guarantees no element of the song outweighs another, which gives the track an overall melancholy but soothing feeling.