After self-recording and releasing his third album, ‘See You There’, in 2019, opening for acts such as The Ataris and Bay Faction, and embarking on his first regional tour, Austin Cooper returned to his home studio to record what would become his fourth album under the No Lungs banner. ‘What You Didn’t Want to Happen Is Happening Right Now’ is not a concept record, but Cooper tends to touch on recurring themes such as staying stagnant in a city where you know you don’t belong, love, loss, heroes and villains and sometimes being unable to decipher which one you are.

In “Curt Kobain” our character is so obsessed with another person that he would rather die than see the person with somebody else. In “Some Strange Odd Hell,” Cooper sings “Why did I stick around.” Even though the songs aren’t necessarily about the same person (it is unknown if these people are even real,) the sentiments of love and loss are plastered throughout the album. Token acoustic track “One Fixed Point” and the upbeat “Future Joy” bring a one-two punch of the feelings of staying stagnant, and “Means to an End,” the album’s closing track, finds our narrator coming to terms that nothing lasts forever which can be taken in a good or bad way. There is some light along the way with tracks like “Indie Kids,” a slow and mellow track straight from a mid 2000s hipster film, and “Big Enigma Energy,” which opens the second half of the record and finds Cooper singing about the gatekeeper mentality of peers in his music scene and the wickedness of people in general.