By now, listeners have likely realized that Greetings From Anhedonia isn't a collection of unrelated songs. Every street name, every location, and every character inhabits the same fictional city: a place built from fragments of memory, addiction, and loss.

One of the album's most immediate and aggressive moments comes in "Blood On Church Street," a song that marries lurching, unconventional rhythms with some of the record's most emotionally direct songwriting.

Yet according to Ryan, he's content to let much of the song remain open to interpretation.

I'm not entirely sure how much I want to say about Blood On Church Street in terms of what it's about. Let's just say it's about addiction and call it a day.

Ironically, while the subject matter remains deliberately opaque, the title itself arrived in an unusually concrete and accidental way.

Ryan recalls wrestling with the song briefly before momentarily stepping away from it.

"I was just sitting with it for about half an hour, and sort of feeling the tyranny of the blank page, as they say. So I took a break from it, and I remember I just happened to be listening to my buddy and labelmate Brent Johnson's band, The Clydes. I highly recommend them to anyone who reads this as well."

While browsing photos of the band, one image unexpectedly unlocked the entire song.

"I can't entirely remember, but I believe that I was looking at their Instagram page, or perhaps just Googling them, and I came upon a picture of them playing in a recently-shuttered New Brunswick club on Church Street."

For Ryan, the location carried immediate personal significance.

"New Brunswick and Church Street have great meaning to me in my life, as Rutgers is my alma mater, and I met my now-fiancée at our dorm, Demarest Hall."

That moment of recognition quickly became something larger than simple nostalgia.

"And just as I happened upon the picture of The Clydes playing on Church Street, I realized that the chorus and bridge of this song kind of sounded to me like they could've come from the New Brunswick scene from about ten or fifteen years ago. And immediately, the lyric 'Blood on Church Street' popped into my head. And from there, all the lyrics poured out very quickly."

Musically, "Blood On Church Street" continues the album's fascination with writing by instinct rather than by theory.

It's one of the album's defining moments: a song that somehow makes odd-meter experimentation feel instinctive rather than academic. Instead of drawing attention to its complexity, "Blood On Church Street" channels it into momentum and urgency.

The opening verse is built around an angular riff played in complete unison by guitars, bass, piano, synths, and drums, while the vocal deliberately resists following the complexity underneath. Ryan says he only analyzed the meter after the fact.

"When I listen to it now, I seem to be counting alternating bars - 6/8, 7/8, 6/8, 11/8 (which I guess is technically 30/8, but that seems pretty much totally unhelpful to anyone). But I don't tend to intellectualize these things. I just write them purely by feel, and sometimes analyze them later."

Despite those constantly shifting meters, Ryan doesn't hear the song as progressive rock in the traditional sense.

"Blood On Church Street doesn't really feel like prog rock to me. To me, the actual feel of it has more in common with Nine Inch Nails' 'March of the Pigs,' which Google tells me is in 29/8, so I guess it's very close."

Like much of Greetings From Anhedonia, the song refuses to sit comfortably inside a single genre. Equal parts alternative rock, industrial abrasion, and singer-songwriter storytelling, it demonstrates Ryan's knack for making adventurous arrangements feel surprisingly accessible.

He laughs at the idea that his repeated attempts to distance the record from prog might sound dismissive to fans of the genre.

"I have absolutely nothing against prog rock, by the way. I feel like I've been inadvertently coming off as offensive to all my prog rock friends by saying the odd times on my record are not prog. For the record, Yes's 'Close to the Edge' record is one of my all-time favorites. I would literally lay down to sleep with that record on every night when I was a junior in high school. But I don't know. To me, the songs on Greetings From Anhedonia just don't have quite that same feeling as prog-rock artists like Zappa or Yes or King Crimson."

Like much of Greetings From Anhedonia, "Blood On Church Street" lives in the space between intuition and calculation. The rhythmic structure may invite analysis, but its greatest achievement is that it never feels like an exercise in cleverness. Instead, it lands as one of the album's most compelling performances, and it serves as a reminder that technical ambition only matters when it serves genuine emotion.

Sometimes that's the shortest distance between a blank page and a finished song.