Oxyzine is back with a scathingly unvarnished new single, “What it Means to Lose,” taking anger, sadness, and helplessness and forging a raw protest song that demands to be heard. Driven by a relentless groove and a vocal delivery that skews near-feral, the song grinds deep into the trauma of systemic repression and generational displacement.
The weight of the song is anchored by the continuing deportations in the U.S., which reveal the violence of bureaucratic cruelty and the quiet complicity upholding it. Underneath the chaos is a point of emotional focus: grief. Viewed through the lens of a colonized South America, Oxyzine draws from a cultural and spiritual unraveling, the call sounding for those who are still playing make-believe that everything’s O.K.
The production flourishes in its dissonance, its glitchy textures, its sudden distortion, and its vast sense of looming collapse that reflects on the instability of existing in a state of perpetual threat. Oxyzine’s sonic choices ramp up the anger of their message and its refusal to allow us to ignore that they have no choice but to engage with this reality.
Oxyzine has delivered an anthem for the digital age: split, powerful, and unfiltered. In a society in which empathy is frequently lost in translation, this track insists upon being listened to at maximum volume.