Have a Nice Life's *Removes* is a bedroom-recorded meditation on depression and disconnection from 2013—lo-fi, intimate, and deliberately unpolished. It's the sound of two people (Zach Hill and Alexander D. Wells) making music in isolation, and it matters because it proved that production value is irrelevant when the emotional weight is real. Listen to it alone, late.
The album opens with wind chimes and a voice saying “I don’t love you anymore,” and from there, Removes never quite lets you settle. This is the second and final album from Have a Nice Life, and it’s a record that understands the particular loneliness of being 22 in a bedroom with a laptop and a guitar.
Zach Hill and Alexander D. Wells recorded Removes between 2012 and early 2013, mostly on their own in whatever spaces they could find. There are no session musicians credited, no studio logos, no engineer’s name in the margins of the artwork. What there is instead is the sound of two people learning to articulate depression through the only tools available to them—MIDI, heavily compressed drums, field recordings, tape hiss, the ambient sound of rooms where not much happens.
The production is anti-production. Every song sounds like it’s being played through a wall, or underwater, or through the memory of hearing it once a year ago. “Shrug” opens with what sounds like a car horn processed into an unrecognizable smear. “I Don’t Love” is built on a single synth note that repeats with the kind of monotony that would be torture if the lyrics weren’t so perfectly aligned with the sound. On “The Big Gloom,” a bass line sits so low in the mix you think you’re imagining it. Most producers would fight that. Hill and Wells lean into it.
The lyrics matter more here than they might on a record with cleaner sonics. They cut through the murk because they have to. “I hate living, and I don’t want to die / That’s a paradox I can’t work out,” Wells sings on “I Don’t Love,” and there’s no metaphor, no poetry to soften it. It’s a statement of fact sung in a voice that sounds like it’s coming from another room in the house.
What’s remarkable is how much personality these limited tools capture. “The Big Gloom” has an almost playful darkness to it, a minor-key melody that keeps threatening to become a pop song before the production drags it back into the muck. “Bloodhail” builds with a kind of strange momentum, a beat that feels almost danceable until you really listen to the content. The production isn’t a limitation—it’s the point. It’s the sound of trying to create meaning in small spaces with no money, no resources, no plan. It’s the sound of making do.
The last track, “Waiting for Black Metal Records in the Mail,” is nine minutes of ambient drone and field recording—a man breathing, wind, something that might be traffic. It’s not a song, and it’s not trying to be. It’s a closing down, a fade to gray.
Removes has aged strangely well, which feels wrong to say about a record this deliberately unfinished. But that’s precisely why it lasts. It’s not trying to sound vintage or retro or like anything except what it is: two people in 2013 making music from a place of genuine unease, with no filter between the thought and the recording. The album cost nothing to make. It sounds like it. It also sounds like nothing else.
The Lineage
Have a Nice Life’s first album, Still Life, came out in 2011 on the small label Mishap. Removes arrived as a kind of darker sibling, more fully committed to the aesthetic of lo-fi melancholy that had been brewing. The band would break up shortly after, and there’s a sense throughout the album that Hill and Wells already knew they were done—that this record was a closing statement, not a beginning.
The influence of this album reaches forward in strange ways. A whole generation of bedroom producers learned from it that you didn’t need fancy equipment to say something real. Artists like Lil Peep, Sad Boys, and the entire SoundCloud rap movement that came later borrowed the template: lo-fi production, unflinching lyrics about mental health, the sound of making music alone.
But Removes predates all of that. It’s not trying to be trendy or influential. It’s just two people saying what they needed to say, in the way they knew how. The fidelity is low. The honesty is not.
🎵 Key Takeaways
- Album opens with wind chimes and 'I don't love you anymore' voice sample.
- Zach Hill and Alexander D. Wells recorded mostly alone without session musicians or studios.
- Production deliberately obscures songs as if played through walls or underwater.
- Lyrics cut through murky production because they have to survive sonically.
- Limited tools capture surprising personality and playful darkness throughout the record.
Why does this album sound so rough compared to other indie music from the same era?
Hill and Wells made a deliberate choice to reject polished production. They recorded on basic home equipment and left in all the murkiness—the compressed drums, the buried vocals, the tape hiss. The lo-fi sound isn't an accident or a limitation; it's the album's actual statement about isolation and depression. They understood that glossy production would undercut the honesty.
Is Have a Nice Life still active?
No. The band broke up shortly after *Removes* was released in 2013. This album is their final project together. Both members have continued making music independently, but as Have a Nice Life, this is it—a closed chapter. There's been speculation about reunions over the years, but nothing has materialized.
Why is this album important if so few people heard it when it came out?
Because it proved that production fidelity and budget are completely irrelevant when the emotional weight is real. The album influenced an entire generation of bedroom producers who realized they didn't need a studio to make something that mattered. It also helped legitimize depression and mental health struggles as valid subjects for indie music—not ironic or performative, but honest.
Further Reading
More from Have A Nice Life