Altitude Theory — Wax Wings

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 — Here's to the ones who went all the way up and meant it — who heard the same thing I heard up there — the lighter-and-clearer, the simpler, the closer — and decided the descent was the part they were done pretending to want. Here's to the ones the mountain kept. We don't say it, but we know who they are. They built their wings the way I built mine — out of everything they took off and left below. Lighter, lighter, lighter — until light became gone, and gone looked, from up there, like flight. Wax wings. Wax wings. They hold you beautifully — right up until the part where they don't. I have been the lighter-and-clearer. I have stood in the gold with nothing in my hands. And I felt it — the pull — the it-would-be-so-easy, the why-go-back, the you-could-just-stay-this-high. There's a hairsbreadth between "I have simplified my life" and "I have nothing left to live in." I came back down. I want to be clear about that. I came back down. But I felt how you wouldn't. They built their wings the way I built mine — out of everything they took off and left below. Lighter, lighter, lighter — until light became gone, and gone looked, from up there, like flight. Wax wings. Wax wings. They hold you beautifully — right up until the part where they don't. The radio goes quiet at a certain altitude. The rope you fixed for them comes back up slack. And the rest of us stand at the high camp doing the math on the oxygen, and we already know the answer, and we go down, and we carry their absence down with us, because somebody has to carry something. So this song is the rope I'm throwing back up the mountain. This is me saying: light is not the same as gone. Don't you confuse them. Don't you dare. You can climb out of everything — you can climb out of everything but the climbing — and the day there's nothing left of you but altitude, you haven't transcended. You've just gone up. And up. And up. And not come down. Come down. Whoever's still up there — come down. Come down with almost nothing. But come down. #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.