Altitude Theory — Summit

From "Cartography of the Vertical" — the debut album by ALTITUDE THEORY, on Berkana Records. 🎧 Subscribe to Berkana Records for original rock, new tracks daily → https://www.youtube.com/@BerkanaRecor... — LYRICS — Three steps. Breathe. Three steps. Breathe. That's the unit now. That's all the distance I can hold in my head. The final ridge keeps lying to me — every rise looks like the last one and it isn't, it isn't, it isn't. The cornice on my left is a lip of snow over a kilometre of nothing. I do not look at it. I count. Three steps. Breathe. The will is a thing I am spending faster than I can make it. And I want to lie down. Everything in me wants to lie down. And I have a list of names of people who lay down up here. I have read the list. So I don't. I keep the unit. Three steps. Breathe. And then — there is nowhere left to go up. There is nowhere left to go up. I'm standing on the highest thing for a thousand miles in every direction. And I want to tell you it was worth it. And I want to tell you what it feels like. And — it feels like a place. A cold, loud, half-lit place where the air is a joke the body isn't laughing at. It feels like nothing. It feels like everything. It feels like the inside of the question I've been climbing. The light up here is gold and it is freezing — both at once — gold light with no warmth in it at all. I left everything below me to get here. Every line. Every name. Every gram. I am as light as I have ever been. And I am standing on the answer, and I still cannot read it. So this is it. This is the top of the map I redrew. This is what radical looks like when you take it all the way: a man, a rock, a view, and not enough air to mean it. Is this transcendence? Or did I just climb high enough to confuse a dying brain for a holy one? I genuinely. Do not. Know. And maybe that's the most honest place a person can stand. Not knowing. At altitude. In the gold and the cold. With nothing left to put down. I cannot tell if I have arrived — or if I have vanished — and from up here — from up here it is the most beautiful thing — to not know — to not know — and to be this high — and to be this light — and to still be breathing — You can't stay up here. Nobody can. That was never the offer. You touch it. You take one breath you'll spend the rest of your life describing. And then you turn around. Getting here was never the point. This — the highest thing — is just the place the map stops. I'm going down now. I'm going down with almost nothing. And I know the way — it's the line I drew coming up. #progressiveMetalcore #progMetal #aimusic — About this release: the lyrics, song structure, theme, and album arc are written from scratch and human-curated through a deliberate songwriting process — not auto-generated. AI music generation is used only to render the final audio from those curated lyrics and style direction. Visuals are AI-assisted.