Fake Friends & Drunk Texts: Tienas' Latest Album Captures His Generation's Disaffection

“My generation is gonna die alone,” says Tienas on 'Rarity' from his latest album, 'O Deluxe'. And in the rest of the record, through shifting moods and fractured personas, he excavates the different layers of that isolation. The album unfurls like an emotional cartography of millennial and Gen Z disaffection; of loneliness not as a passing phase but as a foundational condition. With unflinching clarity and a studio-born sense of theater, Tienas constructs an album that operates as a mirror maze: every track a different angle of the self, refracted through heartbreak, drug-fueled detachment, and existential fatigue.

Where his 2019 debut album, 'O', was an underground marvel — lean, lo-fi, and brimming with creative verve, 'O Deluxe' is the natural evolution: richer, heavier, stranger, and far more ambitious. The 'deluxe' here signals an upgrade in vision and scale. It's a maximalist sprawl that trades minimal hip-hop aesthetics for a dense, textural world built from samples, warped vocoders, lo-fi grit, and moments of sudden, crystalline beauty. It's still unmistakably Tienas — just elevated and sharpened.

'Everybody' kicks off the record with wounded sarcasm, a chaotic blend of fuzzed-out beats and confessional lyricism. Immediately, we’re dropped into a volatile headspace. 'Please Don’t Hug Me Cuz I’m Scared', becomes a vulnerable cocktail of humiliation and self-loathing with yearning. Tienas turns the listener into both confidant and voyeur, drawing us into his inner monologue.

We pivot to 'Rude Boy' and 'Killing Joke' as acts of rebellion — against the industry, against false narratives, against the artist’s own myth. The energy shifts from inward collapse to outward explosion. Through provocations wrapped in cerebral wordplay and surgical beats, there’s a current of defiance running through them, but also a sense of absurdity, as if Tienas knows the system he's battling is already too broken to matter.

Still, the finds its power in the quieter moments. 'Doistillbelieve' and 'Footloose' slow the pulse, hovering in that liminal space between hope and apathy. The mood across the record is in constant flux: 'Rarity' aches with romantic alienation; 'Rain Song' is drenched in ennui; 'Cheap Drugs & Alcohol' walks the tightrope between escape and numbness. Reflecting a state of resignation when love stops meaning anything, these tracks simulate emotional withdrawal, sonically and lyrically. They are made for the late hours when the city quiets, the mind won’t, and every version of yourself takes turns at the wheel.

'Free Game', 'Confrere', and 'Drunk Text' read like the arc of a night out drinking — each track a descent into a more unguarded state. 'Free Game' plays like that loose, tipsy, chatty confessional 'Confrere' follows, turning more introspective and bitter, peeling back the layers of mistrust to reveal the sting of performative friendships. As we get to 'Drunk Text', we're lonely. It’s subdued, almost tender, a blurred, late-night admission of longing when no one’s really listening, but you need to say it anyway.

The way Tienas weaves these phases together is both immersive and cinematic. Even the collaborations in the album come across as fragmentary extensions of his own mind. Whether it’s Rushaki, FTS, or Specter, each guest verse functions like a shard in a broken mirror — echoing his themes, sometimes contradicting them, and often complicating them. The album doesn’t strive for coherence because its subject: identity in its modern form, is splintered by nature.

Throughout 'O Deluxe', the production is incredibly imaginative. R&B and electronic sounds are sliced and looped with grime; voices are pitch-shifted, drowned, manipulated to the point of disorientation. There’s a tactility to it all — the lo-fi beats; the vocal layering; the way a sample will flicker and delay. The sonic language here is reminiscent of early Kanye, filtered through a uniquely underground sensibility — synthesized and yet sensitive.

By the time we reach 'Dangerous', the album’s dusky closer, we've already lived a thousand lives. 'O Deluxe' takes a to many places but catharsis isn't one of them. To end something so expansive with resolution would be reductive. What we have instead is this spontaneous lived experience laid bare in all its tangled, contradictory chaos. The album is expression in its purest form that intends to achieve nothing but resonance; to be a vivid portrait of what it feels like to be here.

Follow Tienas here and listen to the album below:

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