Sixth of the Six is a set of twelve tracks built around a very personal and difficult period in the artist’s life. In his own description, the music began during time spent recording at home with his daughter, often as shared sessions built around simple ideas and playful interaction with sound. That phase later shifted into a prolonged legal and international dispute after the child was taken out of the country by her mother in violation of a court order. The situation, as he describes it, has since involved ongoing legal efforts and coordination across different jurisdictions (more information about the real-life story behind the album and efforts to bring Scott’s daughter Charlotte home can be found at RescueCharlotte.org).

The album doesn’t turn this context into a direct narrative, but it sits underneath everything that follows. It is both a sad and hopeful album, full of love, warmth and pain.

The opening track, “Sixth of the six,” immediately sets the tone for the album’s world. Lyrically it frames a kind of mythologized origin: “You were born at night, born late for supper, born on the 6th of the 6, little Caster and Pollux. Never walked, never crawled, just started running between the walls.” Even in this short fragment, there’s a blend of intimacy and stylized storytelling that defines how the rest of the record unfolds.

Musically, the track comes in with a dense, 90s-leaning beat—sharp, almost whip-crack percussion with a very physical presence in the mix. Stylistically the song sits somewhere between left-field country and a more urban, hip-hop-adjacent electronic aesthetic. There’s also a clear sense of indie experimental pop in the way the elements are combined, at times recalling Beck, especially if his approach to electronic production had been pushed further and made more rhythmically aggressive.

The vocal performance is central here. There’s a strong sense of directness and emotional delivery, but it’s heavily processed—pushed through layers of electronic treatment that transform it into something more fractured and synthetic. That tension between raw vocal intent and digital manipulation becomes one of the defining characteristics of the album.

The second track, "God Put Teeth on the Moon," carries an enormous amount of pain. The narrator recalls — or rather lists — small details that tie him to the loved one he's singing about, and how much he misses her.

"There's a bear in your chair with one lazy eye, there's a cartoon paused on a very small sky. I still do the voices when the house gets numb. The cow says moo, the duck says blah blah blah."

At the same time, all of this stays grounded, resolved in a stylistically unusual way. On one hand, the sound clearly recalls Muse — those dirty guitars, digitally distorted in a specific way. And that operatic vocal, jumping from high notes to very high ones, building a kind of drama that borders on theatricality. On the other hand, the whole arrangement feels a bit small, a bit toy-like, like that "very small sky" from the cartoon in the song.

From there the narrator keeps working through his pain by moving across styles. Here he leans into stadium folk with the kind of explosive, choral choruses that groups like Mumford & Sons made famous. And it lands hard when that form carries lines like: "Pain is just a collapsing, the shell to understanding all these words, all these legal terms, and the truth still crash landing."

In "Tuesdays," we learn that Scott doesn't need miracles. He needs the Tuesdays that come after: the boring stuff, socks and cups left in strange places. Melodically there's still that rock influence, Muse again (at least to my ears), like in the second track, but here it's set against an accessible, four-to-the-floor pop beat — something that even calls to mind Harry Styles' retro leanings.

"Systems" is the album's most popular track, at least on Spotify. Its sparse arrangement, full of open space, builds a sense of purgatory — a word the song actually uses. Here purgatory takes the shape of airports, all blurring into one smear for the narrator, and an empty room with a crib he wakes up in every day like a private hell. The children's choir that comes in is the emotional gut-punch of the track — hard to hear it and not shake inside.

"Christmas Morning" might be the emotional center of the whole album. It wrings you out completely — or maybe walks you through some kind of emotional trial by fire. There's none of the mythologized detail you find in other tracks here. The story gets told as plainly as possible, because there's no other way to tell it: Scott spending Christmas alone, without his daughter. He gets into the specifics — down to ordering a tree on Amazon, having it never show up because Amazon used a third-party carrier, trying to get his money back, and so on. It's exactly those mundane, honest details that wreck you while you're listening. Stylistically it's back in that same stadium-rock territory we've already heard on the album, but it works.

Next comes "Spare Key" – on one hand it's sad, bitter, painful — on the other, it's lit up with hope the whole way through. Musically it pulled me toward Coldplay's more personal, melancholic side, and maybe James Blunt too, especially something like "No Bravery," where he sings about his time at war. That's the territory this song sits in, both sonically and in how directly it handles emotion.

"Last Chorus" is probably the emotional breather you need after the two songs before it — though it's not exactly light either. Stylistically, though, it pulls you out of that headspace. It's the most avant-garde track on the album, playfully mashing together something close to circus-like Ferris wheel music with baroque touches, maybe even a bit of banjo-driven country energy. There's no actual banjo, but you feel that spirit in there. All of this runs at a fast clip, almost hyperpop-adjacent, constantly accelerating, and somewhere in the melodies there's a Paul McCartney quality creeping through. And on top of all that, it's sung in that robotic voice we've heard elsewhere on the album, here processed even more elastically. It's an incredible stylistic mashup — honestly, I haven't heard anything this fresh-sounding all year.

"Woman in Manila" feels like it gathers every stylistic color from the album into one place. There's that Coldplay directness, the retro-leaning four-to-the-floor beat, a touch of pop-folk with banjo runs, vocals that manage to be both raw and electronically treated, and a rock surge capped with a big guitar solo. It pulls all the threads together and strengthens the arc of the album.

After that there's still room left for hope, and the album finds that strength on "Don't Let Go" — a track that pulls off a strange balance. There's gospel muscle in it, that raw push and pull, but also something light-footed you might catch in Steve Lacy or Tyler, The Creator. That combination is where the track gets its power.

"Four Pills" nails a dizzy, feverish state — flickering guitars with a dirty, poisoned tone, bubbling acid-house bass, and a beat that just keeps knocking you down.

"Trying" is another one of those completely unguarded lyrics — words you couldn't swap out for anything else. "Do you remember me? I hope you remember none of this and your first thoughts are of somewhere safe. I hope when you think back, you remember your dad's got your back." It's sung in a raw, heartfelt voice over a simple, warm acoustic guitar, and it's how the album ends.

By the time the album's over, you're left a little dizzy from how many styles have rushed past you, almost like a psychedelic dream. But there's also something that stays lodged in your chest — not just for the people in this specific story, but for everyone, everywhere, going through something similar. You end up genuinely hoping that everyone this album sings about, and everyone who sang on it, gets to be okay. That they find something true. That things turn out fair, for once.