Slowly Slowly’s “Parallel” narrates a day of bad decisions, messy relationships and gaps in the narrator’s own sense of being there. The details jump from a stolen car and a crowded house to a woman burning holes into a phone screen, with “It’s 2012” opening a timeline that seems to run beside the present.
The humor stays close to the mess. Fourteen people share a house and nobody wants to do the dishes. The narrator gets drunk on a Monday, argues over the rules of a game, and keeps returning to someone who says she is not a friend. Then the jokes give way to something harder to pin down: leaving the body, losing time, looking in the mirror and not feeling like yourself. “How do you even tell?” is a question the song does not answer.
The parallel timeline becomes a place to disappear into, somewhere between the life happening around the narrator and the one they can barely follow. By the end, the admission is plain: “I’m not present, I’m not there / That’s on me, fair and square.” The song keeps moving through the gaps.
