Watch Seven Sins · black-and-blood-red lyric video · headphones recommended.

Pain as Author, Teacher, Mother, Son

One of the most striking things about Seven Sins is how many job titles pain is given. Across the track, pain isn’t just a symptom; it’s “author”, “teacher”, and a twisted parent–child pair. That’s the chronic-illness worldview boiled down: pain writes the story, marks the homework, tucks you in at night, and still won’t let you sleep.

Ren’s discography has always treated pain as a character. Sick Boi paints it like a heckling narrator; Hi Ren gives it the mask of Mental Health Itself. Here, the character steps closer to theology. Pain becomes a dark trinity that “twists” and “dismisses”, the mirror image of the Father–Son–Ghost. It’s not just that Ren hurts; it’s that the structure of the universe seems to be teaching through hurt, and he’s brutally honest about how cruel that lesson can feel.

The repetition of the question “Have you ever felt pain?” isn’t just rhetorical. It’s an accusation and an invitation. Either you know this world from the inside, or you don’t — and if you don’t, you’re listening to a dispatch from a country you’ve never had to visit.

From Lennon to the MAC-10: Violence as Background Noise

In the second act the lens pulls back from the bedroom to the blood-red wider world. The Lennon line is doing more than being clever. “Let it be” is supposed to be a balm, a gentle instruction to surrender; Ren’s twist reminds us that Lennon was murdered in the street, his peace anthem literally answered by gunfire. Hope and spectacle are welded together.

When Ren brings in Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, he’s stacking a pattern: prophets of non-violence keep dying violently. The modern media cycle then does its thing — “build ’em, praise ’em, bury ’em, dead ’em” — the cadence itself mimicking the conveyor belt of celebrity martyrdom. Even the way the line lands feels like a firing squad.

All of this feeds into one of the song’s central ironies: pain and outrage are profitable. “Pain makes money when the music lands” is Ren’s dead-eyed awareness that his own suffering — his actual hospital-bed biography — is part of the product. The track sits in that discomfort: speaking truth while knowing the truth is monetised.

Half a Man in a Broken World

When Ren calls himself “half a man with half a chance”, it extends far beyond masculinity. His heart is “half-righteous, half… damned”: the split is moral, psychological, and medical. The body is fractured; the conscience is fractured; even hope is rationed in fractions.

This is where the Sick Boi universe really bleeds through. Lyric callbacks to the bed, the fever, the parasite all reappear in different clothing. The Uruk-hai reference frames dark thoughts like a Tolkien war machine: industrial, relentless, bred for battle. Shards of glass, forensics, bloodstains — everything in this section is sharp, clinical, or weaponised.

Yet even here there’s humour: “Pay me my cheese, rain down parmesan.” The joke lands like a bitter grin during a psych evaluation. It’s Ren acknowledging the absurdity of having to charge rent prices for testimonies from hell.

Seven Sins, One Planet-Sized Mirror

Then comes the roll-call: seven classic deadly sins, each translated into modern language. Pride doesn’t stay in church Latin; it’s the ego that will literally “kill a man” to survive. Lust is not just private desire; it’s the betrayal that “crucifies trust”, a deliberate echo of religious vocabulary that makes infidelity feel like a small crucifixion repeated in bedrooms worldwide.

Gluttony scales up from late-night binge-eating to planetary damage: we “consume and consume” until the Earth itself undergoes a “frontal lobotomy”. That image is horrifying if you sit with it — civilisation as a surgeon removing the parts of the planet that misbehave, leaving a quiet, compliant world with chunks missing.

Sloth becomes endless reruns and scrolling; envy becomes metrics and comparison; wrath becomes the algorithmic rage cycle. Greed, the final sin, is the seed that doesn’t stay personal. Taken individually, each vice is a character flaw; taken together, they’re infrastructure. They build markets and empires, prison systems and click-farms.

The chilling part is the phrase “self-made Armageddon”. There’s no external demon orchestrating this; we are both the architects and the arsonists. The apocalypse is crowdsourced.

“We Inherit the Mean”

In the final descent the camera pulls back one last time. Oceans bleed, shepherds are exiled, and we “follow the sheep”. It’s a savage inversion of the usual biblical roles: the leaders who care are driven away, while the crowd obediently follows whoever is loudest and most profitable.

“We inherit the mean” is one of the key lines in the whole song. On the surface it sounds like a statistic — the average. But it also gestures at cruelty: we inherit a world whose default setting is meanness. Violence, lies, and vanity are not glitches; they’re part of the operating system we hand down.

And still, woven through all this, is that original question: have you ever felt pain? Ren’s answer is yes, relentlessly yes — but the song refuses to leave pain as a purely private drama. Personal torment, social decay, and environmental collapse are presented as different verses of the same hymn.

What Seven Sins Means in the Vault

In the wider Vault narrative, Seven Sins feels like a junction box between earlier cycles. From Hi Ren, it inherits the inner dialogue; from Sick Boi, the medical horror; from the Money Game trilogy, the systemic critique. But here the microscope and the telescope are in the same hand. Ren stands in his own ruined body and somehow manages to talk about ruined oceans in the same breath.

The Welsh opening anchors the track in a specific identity — a sick songwriter from a particular strip of land — while the litany of sins and prophets pushes it towards myth. That tension is where a lot of Ren’s power lives: intensely local, weirdly universal.

For the Vault, this track is a warning flare. It says: if we ignore the voices of the sick, the sensitive, the “too much” people, we don’t just lose one artist; we lose a prophet of feedback from the edge. The body on the kitchen floor is reporting back about more than his own nerves — he’s telling us what the whole nervous system of the planet feels like.