This Is Not the Way It Should Be - Download

A track from 'This Is War' an album that was written and recorded at Morgue Studio (Devon) between 2025 and 2026. All tracks were mixed down April - May 2026.

“This Is Not The Way It Should Be” — A Slow‑Burn Lament with a Reggae Pulse

“This Is Not the Way It Should Be” is built around a warm, reggae‑inflected bassline played by Peter Bright, the track’s low‑end rolls forward with a quiet insistence, pushing against an arrangement that otherwise leans toward gothic minimalism. That tension — warmth beneath coldness, movement beneath stillness — becomes the song’s emotional engine.

The instrumentation is deliberately sparse. Skeletal percussion keeps time like a heartbeat heard through a wall. Shadow‑leaning synths drift in and out of frame, more presence than melody. An angry piano chord punctuates the mix, a flash of human frustration in an otherwise subdued landscape. Over it all sits a vocal delivery that is sad, stark, and unmistakably Cohen‑esque: half‑spoken, half‑sung, carrying the weight of something already lost.

Lyrically, the song traces the slow collapse of a relationship through repetition, erosion, and emotional weathering. The refrain — “This is not the way things should be” — becomes both mantra and indictment, a line that shifts meaning each time it returns. The imagery is intimate and domestic: fading footsteps, creaking floors, whispered truths swallowed before they can reshape the air. Silence becomes a force in the room, a pressure that neither person can name without breaking the fragile peace.

By the final verse, the song abandons any pretence of repair. Shame settles like dust; honesty arrives stripped of comfort. What remains is a portrait of two people standing in the ruins of something once held with tenderness.

“This Is Not the Way It Should Be” is less a conventional song and more a mood‑piece — wounded, intimate, and quietly confrontational. Its subtle reggae pulse gives the darkness a heartbeat, a reminder that even in emotional collapse, something still moves, still breathes, still refuses to disappear.