Production Notes
PS Perkins: Guitars, bass, vocals, floor tom set 2, howl 1
R Thomas: Synth Guitars, backup vocals, floor tom set 1, snare drum, hi hats, howl 2
Mixed and Mastered by Mystic Tape Deck
A Mystic Tape Deck production ©2025
Lyric Sheet
I cut the tree and I hammer the nail
I fetch the water and I carry the pail
Harvest the wheat, and I bundle the bale
Fasten the saddle, the bridle and bit
I shoe the horses and I shovel their shit
I dig forever in the bottomless pit
I'm turning wrenches and I'm fueling the jet
My brow is furrowed and it's blistered with sweat
I'm on a boat with a hook and a net
I'm in the engine room, I'm driving the train
I'm climbing poles in the wind and the rain
I load containers from a towering crane
Repair the derricks for the men who get paid
I'm tugging triples up a slippery grade
I built the factory where the factories are made
I'm in the kitchen now preparing your meal
With hogs to slaughter and potatoes to peel
I hone the blade and I sharpen the steel
Addendums
Within the halls of Hypnos, shining Hephaestus carves
A thousand images of sleep, Ponos sagging in repose beside them
Leaning on his gnarled and flexing creaking cane
Among the soul’s guilty joys, old age and fear, grief and disease
Death, the tolling bell, the call of hunger, want and war
Company to the mother married king who is cast away to wander
Weary and worn, expelled, baleful steps plodding, locked in retreat
Every step along the well-worn road, a spider’s cruel and venomous bite
All of the children, sons of night and darkness, daughters of disputes and ruin
Awake before the sun has risen above the faded purple hills
Exquisite agony in the crackling bones and aching muscles
Where with shovel and scythe the laborers toil and tug
Plodding against the stiff and rutted terraces of farm and field
A yoke upon their shoulders as they stoop to plow and harvest
Hands thick and calloused, creased and cracked, worn leather shoes
Finger joints tight and frozen from a lifetime of exertion and injury
Riddled with deep red scars and wide purple brown bruises
Turn their stiff and sunburned necks to glimpse them passing
On the long and agonizing journey into ordered exile
Flung far from the kingdom, kept at bay beyond borders
Never to return, nor to be seen again amongst the city
Behind fences strung with barbed wires rusting in the salt air
Which sting at the skin and slash at worn woolen robes
Caught and torn, frayed and tattered flaps wave pitiful in the breeze
Those who do not work do not eat, hunger urging them onward
The wages of the righteous is life, to eat bread and return to dust
And the avenues of chatter all lead only to poverty and punishment
Considering all the work of their exertion, all was vanity, all was wind
Yet the stones which secure the foundations of the temples and banks
See how they are not hewn on their own, squared not by lust or leisure
It is the laborer who chips away day after day, season upon season
Because the block not square will set the mightiest towers toppling
Unable to bear the brunt of the forces pushing ever downwards upon them
Crossing to the underworld, deep in the house of Hypnos
Where the walls shake and tremble with the striking force of labor
Born of air and earth, pain, guile, anger and lament all dwell within
Lies, vengeance, arrogance and sloth, vengeance and forgetfulness
Gates guarded by the quiet, dull and drowsy, lurking in foul pools
Amid the ceaseless wailing of sluggish streams and sad omens of screech owls
Ponus goes with Oedipus, sinking into thick and stinking mud
Holding hands with pestilence and ruin, death and distress
Let them all go, begone and let us breathe a pure breath again
And let the beauty return to the woods where the dismal axes cleave and whack
And all who are weary and burdened with disease, hearts faint within you
Draw your deep and airy breaths and rise again before the sun has risen
Casting off the cursed necklace forged by grief, madness and discord
And avail yourselves now of this, the day of your righteous rest
I beseech you now to lay down your shovels picks and plows
To turn your beasts of burden loose upon the fields
For today we drink and sing and make music and merriment
Your barrels of butter are churned and bursting full
Your grain stores are brimming and your orchards filled with fat and ripened fruits
For ampleness is now upon you that the tyrants have been slain
Those who would eat without work and partake of your labor without remittance
Are condemned to wail for eternity in the mud pits which lie beside
The stench of rotten rivers ill from the source which flow but nourish nothing
Now that you no longer labor to feed them, you find yourselves amid abundance
Freed from the burdens they unfairly imposed
Go and run through fragrant meadows and feel the sun’s kiss
And dance upon the breeze which carries you aloft and weightless
Marginalia
Annotation 03-02A The Laborer
This text is generally cataloged under the archetype of The Laborer, though some older repositories classify it as a precursor aspect of The Smith. The distinction is significant. The Smith transforms reality through conscious creative agency. The Laborer sustains reality through necessity. Nazilic commentators frequently describe the two as occupying adjacent positions in the causal cycle: one builds because he must, the other builds because he chooses.
The repeated references to Hypnos, Ponos, Oedipus, Hunger, Grief, and the various personified miseries of Greek cosmology suggest that the poem is depicting labor not merely as economic activity but as an entire metaphysical condition. To labor is to dwell among the children of Night. The worker becomes surrounded by necessity itself—pain, mortality, obligation, and exhaustion.
Annotation 03-02B The Laborer
Particular attention has long been paid to the passage concerning stonecutters:
"the stones which secure the foundations of the temples and banks
See how they are not hewn on their own"
Among Nazilic readers this is often cited as one of the clearest statements of the movement's suspicion toward institutional authority. Temples, kingdoms, corporations, governments, and even ideological systems are portrayed as structures whose apparent permanence obscures the countless invisible laborers beneath them.
The poem repeatedly redirects attention away from rulers and toward builders. The laborer becomes a kind of sacred figure precisely because their contribution disappears into the completed work. The more successful the structure, the less visible its creators become.
Annotation 03-02C The Laborer
The latter half of the fragment contains what many regard as a rare glimpse of Nazilic eschatology.
After descending into the House of Hypnos and cataloging the many afflictions that accompany existence, the speaker suddenly announces the overthrow of "the tyrants" and invites the laborers to set down their tools.
This moment has been interpreted in several ways.
The orthodox reading holds that it refers to the eventual dissolution of the causal prison itself. Hunger, scarcity, coercion, and hierarchy are not eternal conditions but symptoms of a broken system. When the system is finally corrected, labor remains—but only labor undertaken willingly.
The final lines are often cited:
"Now your labors are of only love and ludic rapture"
Nazilic philosophers frequently compare this to the transformation of work into play, necessity into creativity, and survival into expression. The ideal future is not one in which humanity ceases creating. Rather, it is one in which creation is no longer extracted through suffering.