REASON ON TRIAL (RE-TRIALED)

Yesterday I ended with a road.

Same road.

Different person.

Another circle.

And I said that today we were going all the way back to where SevenFiftyTwo started.

I meant that quite literally.

Reason on Trial.

Before there was The Great Divide.

Before there was Circles Of.

Before we had any idea that the lyrics I was writing and the riffs we were making would eventually become Chapters of something considerably bigger than any of us had planned.

There was Reason on Trial.

I’ve written about that period before.

I had started writing again after being away from making music for quite a while.

Mostly at night, usually when I should have been sleeping, trying to get thoughts out of my head and into something slightly more useful.

At the time I was thinking a lot about how strange the world had become. And the lyrics also carry remnants of my past making music, to some extent.

Facts somehow seemed even more negotiable than when I first observed these patterns many years ago.

Common sense had become something people could use to justify almost anything as long as they said it confidently enough.

People could make decisions that hurt thousands and then explain the consequences away with numbers, circumstances or good intentions.

Everybody seemed incredibly certain that somebody else was the problem.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that I had a thought.

What if Reason itself was put on trial?

Not a person.

Not a political party.

Not one particular side of an argument.

Reason, stripped of excuses and challenged by its consequences.

What would happen if all the explanations, excuses and justifications actually had to stand in a courtroom and answer for what they had produced?

That became Reason on Trial.

And without me understanding it at the time, it also became the song that opened the door to SevenFiftyTwo and everything we have created since.

Not Chapter 01.

That distinction matters.

When The Great Divide eventually started taking shape, Reason on Trial didn’t belong there.

It had helped start this whole thing, but it wasn’t part of that Chapter.

So it stayed where it was.

Outside.

Then we kept moving.

The Great Divide became Chapter 01.

We finished it.

And somewhere after that, BLAME started asking questions that eventually led us towards patterns.

Patterns became circles.

And circles became Chapter 02.

The strange thing is that the further we travelled into this Chapter, the more I started hearing Reason on Trial differently.

The song hadn’t changed.

We had.

Which should sound familiar by now.

There is a line in it:

You blame the world, you blame the times But you chose the blade, you drew the lines

When I first wrote those words, they belonged to the courtroom.

By the time we had written BLAME, TRUST, TIME and started understanding what CIRCLES actually meant, they belonged somewhere else too.

Because that is one of the uncomfortable things this Chapter kept returning to.

We are very good at explaining ourselves.

We can justify almost anything if we are given enough time.

We blame circumstances.

Other people.

The system.

Our childhood.

History.

Technology.

Politicians.

Corporations.

Algorithms.

And sometimes we are even right.

But being able to explain why something happened does not necessarily remove our own part in what happens next.

That distinction became increasingly difficult for me to ignore while writing Circles Of.

And suddenly this song from the beginning of SevenFiftyTwo was standing there again.

Waiting.

We didn’t want to simply put the old version on the EP.

Too much had happened since then.

The way we make music had changed.

The way we express what I write had changed.

And more importantly, the context around the song had changed.

So we put Reason back on trial, because I felt we were even angrier and needed to express it this time around.

Hence, Re-Trialed.

There is something I really like about the fact that Circles Of begins with TRUST and ends here.

TRUST is probably the closest I have come to putting myself directly inside one of these songs.

It is about a circle I lived inside for years before properly understanding what it had become, the equivalent of putting my own body on trial, with my own mind as judge and jury.

Then comes TIME.

A completely different kind of circle.

Something given to me by my father that I hope I can pass on to my own children.

BLAME looks outward before realising that the person doing the blaming might need to look inward too.

CIRCLES gave all of those ideas a shape, and tries to show that we are all part of the patterns we create globally in some way.

Regardless of whether we write books about how we won’t repeat the mistakes of the past, we still own the responsibility to actually learn from them. Not just write about them on social media, put them in books or repeat them in pretty speeches from a podium somewhere.

SUMMER INSOMNIAC looks backwards at the same life from a different point in it.

And then we arrive here.

Back at the beginning.

Back in the courtroom.

Except this time, instead of my own body being the accused, it’s the way we reason that’s being judged.

And this time around we arrive carrying everything that happened in between.

Maybe that is why Reason on Trial finally found the place it didn’t have when I first wrote it.

It had to go around once.

So did we.

Seven days ago I started this by trying to explain why we called this Chapter Circles Of.

I’m not sure I could have explained it properly without walking through the songs one by one.

Because they are not six versions of the same story.

They are different stories.

Different moments.

Different parts of life.

Some deeply personal.

Some looking much further outside myself.

But they kept returning to the same place.

The patterns we inherit.

The ones we create ourselves.

The ones we blame on somebody else.

The ones we desperately need to break.

And the ones we hope never end.

That is Circles Of.

Or at least that is what it became for me.

I have said this a few times during these seven days, but it probably matters most here at the end.

I don’t have the answers to most of the questions in these songs.

Neither do we as SevenFiftyTwo.

I don’t think we are supposed to.

I’ve never been particularly interested in telling somebody what they are supposed to see when they hear something I wrote.

I can tell you what I saw when I wrote it.

I can tell you why it mattered to me.

Then the song leaves us.

And if we have done this right, somewhere along the way it stops belonging to just SevenFiftyTwo.

We hope that you put your own memories into it.

Your own anger.

Your own people.

Your own mistakes.

Your own circles.

Maybe you recognise one that needs to be broken.

Maybe you recognise one worth protecting.

Maybe you just hear a song you like.

That is fine too.

These seven Notes were never supposed to explain the music until there was nothing left for you to discover.

I just wanted to open the door a little further than we normally do.

To show you where some of it came from.

The writing.

The decisions.

The mistakes.

The things that changed while we were making it.

And some of the things I didn’t understand until much later.

From Friday, 25 September 2026, Circles Of belongs to you.

Six songs.

One Chapter.

And somehow the last one takes us all the way back to the first door I opened without knowing where it would lead.

Reason on Trial.

Again.

The Circle Closes.