Cam Ezra’s Dead Internet battles paranoia of being trapped in a digital dystopia

Cam Ezra’s Dead Internet runs across sixteen tracks of cloud rap, lo-fi, electronic textures, and pop and R&B inflections, tracing a mental space shaped by constant connectivity, algorithmic feedback, and emotional overload. The album moves through unease, irony, self-observation, and withdrawal, returning often to ideas of surveillance, performance, control, and fatigue without turning them into slogans or arguments. Vocals sit between confession and detachment, while the production shifts restlessly, rarely settling into a fixed structure or tone. Some moments feel dense and absorbing, others feel scattered or unresolved, but the record holds its attention through persistence rather than hooks or clarity. It plays like a stream of consciousness rather than a sequence of statements, circling the same pressures from different angles and never offering a clean resolution, only the sense of staying inside a world that does not switch off.

What It’s Like to Spend Time With This Album

Spending time with Dead Internet feels less like going from one song to the next and more like staying inside a continuous mental space. The album rarely resets its mood between tracks, instead carrying forward a sense of unease, self-observation, and digital fatigue that surfaces in different forms across the record. Tracks like Crown Vs Pedestal and Complx establish that tone early, with lyrics circling ego, worth, and inner negotiation, while the production stays restless, shifting speed and texture rather than settling into a fixed pattern. Later moments, such as Sunken Living Room, Orwell, and the title track, return to ideas of surveillance, performance, and artificial systems, often pairing restrained vocals with layered, slightly distant production that keeps emotion present but not fully exposed.

The album does not always hold together evenly. The constant movement between styles and structures can feel absorbing in one stretch and scattered in another. The reliance on processing and atmosphere sometimes comes at the expense of melodic clarity. Tracks like Terrariums and Jawscercize stretch out and build space, which gives the record room to breathe, but can also slow its momentum. That unevenness is part of the experience rather than a flaw to correct, and it reflects the same tension the album returns to lyrically, between immersion and distraction, connection and distance, control and drift. Over the full length of the album, Dead Internet leaves less of a memory of individual hooks and more of a sustained emotional residue, a sense of staying inside a world that feels familiar, uneasy, and difficult to step out of.

The Moments That Stick

Certain tracks stand out not because they aim for emphasis, but because they clarify what the album is emphasizing. Crown Vs Pedestal opens with a confrontational edge that sets the tone for the rest of the record, framing identity as something negotiated rather than owned. The repeated line about crowns and pedestals reads less like a hook and more like a statement that lingers in the background of later tracks. Complx follows with a heavier, slower feel, its bass and layered production giving weight to lines about trade-offs, ambition, and internal conflict. These early moments do not resolve anything, but they establish the emotional logic that the album continually returns to.

Later tracks push that logic further inward. Orwell draws attention to observation and manipulation without becoming literal or didactic, and its references to surveillance and perception feel integrated into the album’s wider sense of unease rather than presented as a separate theme. Sunken Living Room shifts into a more enclosed, reflective space, where paranoia and emotional residue sit closer to the surface. The title track, Dead Internet, acts less as a summary and more as a point of stillness, pulling the album’s ideas about artificial systems, exhaustion, and self-awareness into one place without offering closure. Together, these moments give the record its internal shape, not through narrative or progression, but through repetition, variation, and emotional pressure.

What’s Left After It Ends

What stays is the tension the album keeps returning to, between control and drift, presence and detachment. Lines about deepfakes, surveillance, artificial systems, and traded identity do not resolve into a message, but they do leave a residue. The repeated ideas of performance in Crown Vs Pedestal, the watchfulness in Orwell, and the resignation in Hibernate linger longer than any single hook. Even the more open tracks, like Terrariums, feel enclosed by the same logic, as if every moment of lightness is framed by the awareness that it is temporary or conditional.

That unfinished feeling is not accidental. Dead Internet avoids closure in structure as much as in tone. Tracks stretch, change direction, or dissolve without a clear payoff. The record ends not with a statement but with withdrawal. Hibernate closes on retreat rather than arrival, which feels consistent with the album’s view of digital life as something that surrounds rather than concludes. The album does not step outside that world to comment on it. It stays inside it, naming fragments, repeating pressures, and leaving them unresolved.

Stream Dead Internet on Spotify, and stay tuned with Cam Ezra on Instagram.