The evocative opus sporting the moniker A Plea for Decency, out now via Gymnocal Industries, is a compilation by Picture Ann consisting of four ambient soundscapes with ominous, melancholy flavours to them. Discordant drones, haunting textures, and song titles so brilliant only a mother could hate them: the release essentially serves as a stopgap between 2025’s wonderfully ghastly There Are Only Goodbyes Between Us and an upcoming trilogy of albums designed to leave you feeling terrible about yourself and the world around you.
One could be forgiven for thinking the title carries political over- or undertones, or that it somehow functions as a comment on the state of the world, but that could not be further from the truth. Rather, it is a strange, intense, and introspective journey into a shadow-world of the lies we continually tell ourselves in order to cope, where unexpected horrors and destructive illusions manifest themselves in the most subtle yet twisted ways, often with a terrible outcome.
In the words of J.N., “A Plea for Decency is very much a portrait of grief and despondency, and each track revolves around an obsession with the mystery of how chance and circumstance impact our lives, more often than not in ways that are outright soul-destroying. On another level, the record is also a musical treatise on (and a homage to) the redemptive power of art and how it is capable of transforming us. Without music, how else are we to make sense of an unthinkable world?”
The avenues we explore consistently leave us feeling empty, and the name of this particular excursion into ambient darkness is essentially a plea for a last-minute reprieve from that.
A Plea for Decency was released digitally by Gymnocal Industries on 7 August 2026.
