All 54 Songs on 2025’s Most Insane Achievement Listed in Order of Awesomeness
OK! I’m actually getting round to this! I know I’ve promised to write this post several times but, kid, I make a lot of promises on this blog, they’re practically meaningless. Your Mum can relate, mate, trust me, now pipe down and read the rest of this post.
Boston’s* Hallelujah the Hills (HtH) first announced their plan to released ‘DECK’ in late 2022. By that point, HtH were fifteen years into a recording career that had produced seven studio records of that were all varying degrees of extremely decent to incredibly great. The band were hardly strangers to crazy ambitions and thinking outside the box: they had released albums inspired by 19th century spiritualist scammers; albums that were instrumental scores to a book about the importance of 1968 written by frontperson Ryan H. Walsh; and they once even discovered, on April 1st 2022, field recordings of clairvoyants receiving messages that proved the paranormal origins of many of The Beatles’ songs. I guess that last one isn’t really proof of the band’s eclectic ambitions, more their good luck in unearthing these 1958 recordings, but I still felt it was worth mentioning. They’d never done anything close to as ambitious as ‘DECK’ before though. Few artists have.
(that’s Boston, Massachusetts, USA, not Boston in Lincolnshire, just East of Nottingham. Just wanted to make that clear early in case you were confused by the rest of the article not making any jokes about Fred Maddison or wry references to St Botolph’s Church)
In an idea that frontperson Walsh apparently had in mind for decades, the project would be called ‘DECK’ because it represented a deck of cards. There’d be fifty two cards. Each card would be a song. There’d be a ‘suit’ of thirteen songs in the ‘Diamonds‘ album (“a proper studio follow up to ‘I’m You’“); thirteen songs in the ‘Clubs‘ album (“lo-fi faster, punkier, dirtier songs”); thirteen songs in the ‘Hearts‘ album (“a sparser, mostly acoustic, yet carefully orchestrated, album full of weepers”); and thirteen songs in the ‘Spades‘ album (“a free-form, experimental record”). All four ‘suits’ would be released on the same day and collectively form the 52 track ‘DECK’ project. The listener would “Be able to pull 13 random cards, put their corresponding songs in the order you pulled the cards, and voila, you have your own unique version of the record that might function like an audio-tarot-card-reading“. It was, obviously, an hilariously overambitious folly that would destroy either the entire band, their collective mental health, or – most likely – both. It’s the kind of shit you’d hear sent Brian Wilson mad in Walsh’s beloved 1968. It’s the kind of thing you’d read about being an early plan for ‘Chinese Democracy‘ that finally convinced Slash that Axl Rose was beyond the point of no return. When Charles Manson first met with Phil Kaufman to explore the possibilities of releasing music, he probably described the ‘DECK’ project. The idea of this project is the rantings of a madman. I immediately begun to be concerned about the band’s collective cocaine consumption.
LOOK AT THIS POST, GIRL
Necessary Evil 