I feel dumb I’m watching
staring from the ceiling
turn me inside out
or put me down
cause it’s always you, yeah you
a broken record spinning
always there repeating
that I love you so
but you already know
cause it’s always you, yeah you
Photo by Juliette Boulay
Burgeoning trio Deux Visages is vocalist Daphney Hanono, guitarist Jack Chiu and bassist Tony Jouvin. Their emergence has been a whirlwind. Founded over a thread of DMs in high school, they were hastily signed to Atlantic Records after word of their rampant and immersive live shows hit.
Fast-forward >> a series of singles, an EP, support tours with Mannequin P*ssy,…
Catch-22, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is defined as follows: "a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule." The Cambridge Dictionary defines this in simpler terms, describing it as "an impossible situation where you are prevented from doing one thing until you have done another thing that you cannot do until you have done the first thing."
A catch-22 situation may be described as a paradox, or a self-contradicting statement, as it is impossible to fulfill a condition that requires a prerequisite condition to be completed when the situation itself prevents said condition from being completed.
In 2024, the band Deux Visages released their first EP entitled Catch 22. It features 6 songs: February, Cut Bangs, Tethered, Excuses, Go Away, and Mosquito. The first four songs in the EP have previously been released as singles, while the two new songs were released with the EP itself. However, one song from the band's discography is notably missing; Cheetah, the band's first ever single released.
This raises a major question: how come this song was not included in the band's EP, despite it being their first ever and most significant release? In this yapsesh, I will be diving into the potential reasons why the song may be missing, as well as a lyrical analysis on how Cheetah and Tethered connect. I will try to include in a separate post (as the body of this one is lengthy as-is) why the latter song is included while the former is missing.
The simplest answer to the question is that the band wanted to give the rest of their discography the opportunity to shine. Cheetah has over 3 million streams on Spotify alone and is their most-streamed song. Tethered comes second at 1 million streams, while the remaining songs have less than 500 thousand streams. As we can see here, there is a large disparity in terms of streams between Cheetah and the rest of Deux Visages's discography.
In addition to this, Cheetah has actually been included in the singles of two other songs, namely Tethered and Cut Bangs, when they were first released. Including Cheetah a third time would cause the song to be overplayed. Thus, Cheetah was excluded from the EP in favor of adding two new songs to it.
The more complicated answer, and also the answer that I like, is that all songs in Catch 22 ARE examples of catch-22 situations except for Cheetah, thus it was excluded.
In an interview with The Nuance Magazine in 2023, it was revealed that the song Tethered came about while the band was trying to figure out the riff for Cheetah. Tethered eventually released in the same year as Cheetah, sharing a Spotify single release with the latter song.
In the same interview, the lead vocalist of the song, Daphney Homono, discusses the themes of both songs. For Cheetah, she says that it "reflects the difficult experience of trying to leave someone you still have feelings for." To quote the singer:
“I always feel like in relationships it’s very hard to be the one to leave because you love somebody so much…no matter what happens or what the other person does you can’t really leave because you love them so much.”
For Tethered, on the other hand, she states: “I wanted the lyrics to tie into codependency and being in that situation where you don’t know if you’re just stuck to that person because you’re comfortable and you love them or because it’s something that’s really good for you so it follows the struggle between that."
Despite how both songs have differing themes, interestingly enough, the two songs actually seem to be related to one another based on their lyrics. Cheetah and Tethered represent the feelings of two people who are in the same codependent relationship. Both people in the relationship are still in madly in love with each other, but one is unsure of if their relationship truly is healthy and tries to leave, while the other allows them to leave yet accepts them back with open arms when they return again and again to them.
Cheetah is a push and pull between the internal forces of one half of the relationship. They watch their other half leave, knowing that it's because they want something healthier and more stable, but rather than breaking it off, they continue to wait for them to return (see: the chorus of the song). They know that their partner has expressed countless times that they're unhappy in their relationship, but continue to yearn for and chase after them anyways, which leads to them being on and off (see: the second verse of the song).
Tethered, on the other hand, is the other half of the relationship attempting to leave. The first verse of the song is the singer trying to evict their partner from their life. They tell them that they want them gone while their partner desperately clings onto them, but internally they know that they can't let go of them that easily either, so they try to erase every trace of their other half from their life. It fails. They return to one another and continue this unhealthy cycle of leaving, falling in love with one another again, and remembering why they left in the first place.
One notable lyric from Tethered that supports this is "I can't tell if you're my light or the solace in my vice," representing how their relationship blurs the line between their partner being a force of good change in the other's life and their partner just being a means to an end of being loved. Another is "I'll be the moth and you'll be the light, burn me up until I feel something warm inside," showing that they run back to their partner as if transfixed by them, craving the intensity of being loved by them that they couldn't find anywhere else.
From Tethered, we gain the important context that the partner attempting to leave in Cheetah doesn't really want to leave either, despite how desperately they seem to insist so in that song. From Cheetah, we learn that the partner who continues to wait isn't just passive, rather, they continue to attract their partner to return to them and start this cycle over and over again. The final lyrics of Tethered insist that they're "Forever tethered evermore," or permanently tied together despite everything.
So, what makes Tethered a catch-22 situation while Cheetah isn't?
