something that will always confound me, at least at time of writing, is that despite how often their songs are used, almost no creators seem to understand what FREE99 are going for in their music. their style is very emotionally unsubtle and raw, very angsty, explicitly nostalgic for/inspired by the late 90s - early 00s, and often have queer themes. and what's weird is all these things mesh pretty well with the juvenile and underground aspects of gd culture! glue girl by twigxcabaret and gayskeleton was the first time i heard them in gd, and nails the angsty and trans themes, but doesn't really match the edgy shadow the hedgehog nu metal darkness, out of this world by perox8 deserves its status as an incredibly influential and one of a kind level, and nails the dark noisiness and brash underground experimentation, but doesn't really fit the nostalgic or angsty vibe, and the amount of straight up generic levels i've seen with these girls' music is truly baffling

thankfully there is at least one level that understood the assignment perfectly. (it's this level.) i dunno who zubwill is and nothing else from them really catches my attention, but this level absolutely kills the song representation. the first half has this mysterious and surreal art evoking the motion graphics or edgy anime openers (or perhaps certain AMVs), even the font choice feeling appropriate, as well as being lightly reminiscent of melancholic levels in lineage of lonely travel. and then the chorus hits, stripping back all that for incredibly loud effects, noisy and repetitive object usage, and art straight out of an emo kid's sketchbook. it's exactly the kinda deviantart myspace shit FREE99 works in and amplifies and i just don't know why there isn't more of this, given levels like requiem by lithifusion or delete file by ethan2sus exist

even though i've thought it over quite a while, i feel pretty weird giving this level a 10, even if a low one, with how many levels i have at a 9 i think are way better constructed and creative and ambitious than this. it's really not that far off from many other levels that don't do anything for me, with how its structured and many of the kinds of art and effects it uses, the gameplay mostly a means to an end, and how copy paste the chorus/drop part is (the noisy object usage is the correct choice, but even that i've seen done much better before). but at the end of the day, there's not many levels out there that can give me full body chills when they hit, and the rare few that do definitely deserve the honors, coz rly that's what it's all about