Music / Sincere Engineer

Sincere Engineer is both a solo act and full band fronted by Chicago native Deanna Belos. Belos began performing with her acoustic guitar in college in 2015, and after being discovered by Red Scare Industries founder Toby Jeg and given her big break opening for Brendan Kelly of The Lawrence Arms. This led to her meeting producer Matt Jordan, who connected her with a full band to record her first album, Rhombithian (2017), followed by a long hiatus (including the COVID-19 Pandemic) before the followup, Bless My Psyche (2021).

Although she still tours as a solo act, since the production of Rhombithian Sincere Engineer has consisted of a full band with Deanna Belos on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Kyle Geib on lead guitar, Nick Arvanitis on bass and backup vocals, and Adam Beck on drums and backup vocals.

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Discography

• Sincere Engineer (EP) (2015)
• Rhombithian (2017)
• Sincere Engineer on Audiotree Live (2019)
• "Trust Me" (single) (2021)
• "Tourniquet" (single) (2021)
• "Out of Reach" (single) (2021)
• "Come Out for a Spell" (single) (2021)
• "Recluse in the Making" (single) (2021)
• Bless My Psyche (2021)
• "Trust Me (acoustic)" (single) (2022)
• "Library of Broken Bindings" (single) (2022)
• "Bottle Lightning Twice" (single) (2022)

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This band provides examples of:

• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: "Gone for So Long" includes the line "Once AND for all, once AND for all".
• Album Closure: Both Rhombithian and Bless My Psyche end with a slow acoustic guitar ballad ("Ghosts in the Graveyard" and the Title Track "Bless My Psyche", respectively), although the contrast is sharper with Rhombithian, which consists entirely of upbeat hard-rock songs before then, and which ends "Ghosts in the Graveyard" and the album as a whole by letting you actually hear Deanna set down her guitar and leave the studio.
• The Alcoholic: A very common trope in punk music, and Belos' vocals have been called out as a stellar example of the "drunk punk" aesthetic. The songs feature frequent Self-Deprecation about drinking too much, with "Ceramic Tile" a straight-up anthem about waking up hung over. Deanna has said she used to actually get hammered before every performance to try to quell her stage fright before giving it up to preserve her health, but still channels that uninhibited energy into her singing.
• All Love Is Unrequited: The speaker in most of Sincere Engineer's songs (Word of God an only slightly fictionalized Deanna Belos) seems to never actually get together with the nameless guy she's so hung up on, or if so it doesn't last long or end well. (Given that Deanna has mentioned being in a stable relationship with her boyfriend, presumably the happier parts of her dating history have just been left out of her music.)
• Animated Music Video: The video for "Tourniquet" is an animation by Nolan J. Downs, the one for "Recluse in the Making" is a Machinima Deanna made herself on The Sims 4, and the one for "Library of Broken Bindings" is one she drew herself as extremely Limited Animation of doodles.
• Ascended Fangirl: Deanna Belos grew up idolizing The Lawrence Arms and Alkaline Trio, and was able to play with both bands on tour and become friends with their members after the release of Rhombithian, even recording a performance of her song "Shattering" with her hero Chris McCaughan — a real Crowning Moment of Heartwarming for someone who's been so open about her history of insecurity, anxiety and depression.
• Bedroom Pop: Deanna has said she wanted to branch out from Pop Punk and began experimenting with this genre during the pandemic, when she had a lot of free time to sit around with her computer making synthesized backing tracks. Her two new singles "Library of Broken Bindings" and "Bottle Lightning Twice" both feature far more traditional pop vocals than her usual punk rock Harsh Vocals, and have a much more prominent Hip-Hop inspired backbeat.
• Big Damn Kiss: Notably completely absent from the music videos (and only directly mentioned in a song once, as "I want to touch you with my mouth" in "Hurricane of Misery") with the notable exception of the triumphant Big Damn Kiss ending of the "Dragged Across the Finish Line" video, consisting of Deanna and her Love Interest awkwardly bumping the trash cans they're wearing over their faces together.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: "Overbite" tells the story of Deanna Belos being a typical gifted kid who found herself in over her head and rapidly running out of motivation in college, scuttling her plans at a highly-paid medical career. She's gone into more detail in interviews about how her undergrad years consisted of staying up till all hours of the night procrastinating on studying while writing songs, and much of the tracklist of Rhombithian comes out of this time in her life.
  • Belos has also joked about this on a musical level, calling herself an untrained amateur (she was mostly self-taught at guitar from the age of eleven because she didn't have the patience to learn to read music or play classical pieces) compared to her "professional" bandmates.
• Cassette Futurism: For some reason, the mansion Deanna is squatting in for the "Out of Reach" music video is filled with old CRT TVs hooked up to antennas (which are picking up analog broadcasts in standard definition), even though she's also seen having and using a modern smartphone. All of the programs being shown are from the past (the 1980s or earlier), including footage of an Apollo rocket launch being shown as though it were breaking news, and it seems to be a bit of a plot point that none of the TVs has a working remote and she has no way to control them other than turning them on or off (hence all of them constantly playing different channels).
• Changed for the Video: The music video for "Out of Reach" adds an acoustic intro not present on the album (where "Tourniquet" and "Out of Reach" are Siamese Twin Songs).
• Companion Cube: "Ceramic Tile" is an ironic love song addressed to Deanna's bathroom floor, as the only companion who hasn't deserted her after last night's disastrous night of drunken partying.
• Cosy Catastrophe: It is strongly implied that whatever surreal event caused Deanna's situation in the "Out of Reach" music video is something that left her the last human being on Earth.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: The music video for "Corn Dog Sonnet No. 7" is basically a Lyric Video showing the lyrics to the song written on objects around Deanna's house with mustard. It's also mostly a Literal Music Video, with most of the shots either depicting the action described in the song or depicting Deanna literally playing the song.
• Cover Drop: The video for "Ceramic Tile" does this for the Rhombithian album cover, with Deanna holding her nose and jumping into the ocean in the same pose as the girl in the photo (in an ambiguous suicide attempt).
• Creator In-Joke: A number of song titles make reference to Belos' failed career plan to become a dentist — her song from Rhombithian specifically about this part of her life is called "Overbite" (referring both to a flawed facial feature and the idea of "biting off more than you can chew"), and a later song from Bless My Psyche, "Dry Socket", refers to the socket from a lost tooth that's healed so it's no longer bleeding or painful, as a metaphor for a breakup ("All my nerve endings are dead").
  • Deanna is also a high school math nerd, and the title of Rhombithian is (made-up) Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness for "rhombus-shaped" (a reference to the state of Illinois being roughly shaped like a rhombus). The band all got rhombus-shaped tattoos to celebrate the album's release.
• Cute, but Cacophonic: A lot of people's reaction to Deanna's appearance vs. her singing voice.
• Dancing on a Bus: "Bottle Lightning Twice"'s music video shows Deanna singing and dancing in an empty subway car, interspersed with her practicing boxing.
• Disco Dan: Deanna has joked about growing up at the exact time the punk genre was at its lowest level of popularity among teenagers — the late 2000s to early 2010s — and therefore having no one to talk about her favorite music with in high school. (She credits her interest in the genre to being a tomboy who was obsessed with the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series.) The pop-punk revival was just beginning when Rhombithian came out in 2017, and Sincere Engineer's star has been rising along with the genre's in general since then.
  • Ironically, Deanna has also talked about being the opposite of a gatekeeping purist and unironically enjoying the easy-listening and "dad rock" songs that played when she worked in a dental office as a teen, expressing sincere appreciation for bands her fellow punk musicians dunk on like The Eagles and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. (Her YouTube channel shows the band happily covering poppy '80s and '90s songs like "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" by Tears for Fears and "Losing a Whole Year" by Third Eye Blind.) Hilariously, with "Library of Broken Bindings" and "Bottle Lightning Twice" she seems to be intentionally getting into the Bedroom Pop trend several years late while Gen Z influencers like Willow Smith and Olivia Rodrigo are getting into pop punk.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The pills the speaker takes in "Library of Broken Bindings" are supposed to be Dramamine for motion sickness, but since the speaker being trapped on a ship at sea is a metaphor for isolation and seasickness for the resultant depression, the real meaning of the line is something much darker.
  I wanna go home, I wanna go home, I got homesickness
  This Dramamine dose gets less and less effective
  And I don't feel alive when we're offshore
  I take one, I take two, I take three more...
  I take three more...
• Driven to Suicide: Suicidal depression is Played for Laughs as Black Comedy via Lyrical Dissonance with "Shattering" only to come back much more seriously as the topic of "Ghosts in the Graveyard".
• Driving Song: "Coming In Last" plays with Lyrical Dissonance, sounding like an exciting driving song (and with a music video showing Deanna driving around with her bandmates) but with lyrics about being stuck motionless in a traffic jam.
• The Dying Walk: The Surreal Music Video for "Tourniquet" shows Deanna going on one of these after waking up in the hospital where they were unable to treat her mortal injury (consisting of having her heart literally ripped out).
• Folk Punk: The acoustic versions of Sincere Engineer's catalogue from before Rhombithian might qualify as this, particularly "Shattering". Interestingly, the acoustic version of "Trust Me" averts this, and is much more squarely in the Indie Rock category (as a prelude to Deanna's transition to Bedroom Pop).
• Flipping Helpless: The title of "Dragged Across the Finish Line" becomes hilariously literal in the music video because the trash-can outfit doesn't allow Deanna to get back up again after falling onto her back.
• Future Me Scares Me: A trope invoked metaphorically to describe Deanna's self-loathing over her inability to keep the commitments she makes to people in "Trust Me".
  I put too much trust in future me
  She can't be trusted, please trust me
  Everything she says is such a lie
• Girly Run: The footraces in the "Dragged Across the Finish Line" video are all hilariously this, since the trash cans have no cutout to let the people inside them see where they're going.
• Great Big Library of Everything: The haunting title metaphor of "Library of Broken Bindings" is being trapped somewhere that looks like one of these until you open the books and find all the pages have been ripped out.
• Happy Ending Override: "Recluse in the Making" is a sequel of sorts for "Overbite" — since they both describe episodes in Deanna Belos' Real Life — and shows that despite the moment of triumph when Deanna learned to Be Yourself at the end of "Overbite", the Surprisingly Realistic Outcome is that despite finding success as a musician surrounded by friends and fans, her constantly feeling like a failure never actually went away (because of the Hard Truth Aesop that there is no sudden magic cure for depression).
• Harsh Vocals: The most notable feature of the band to most fans — Deanna's raw, harsh, throaty vocals are worthy of her heroes Matt Skiba and Brendan Kelly, and are the main reason some people characterize the band as emo or "screamo" rather than straight Pop Punk. Producer Matt Jordan said when he heard Deanna sing at The Fireside Bowl in Chicago he was so impressed he offered to work on a record with her on the spot. Belos' voice is a major contrast to how women in music — even in the punk genre — are usually expected to sound, and it's only in more recent releases (the acoustic version of "Trust Me", her new Bedroom Pop singles "Library of Broken Bindings" and "Bottle Lightning Twice") that she's begun using a mellower, sweeter voice as a lead vocalist.
• Hyperventilation Bag: In "Bottle Lightning Twice".
  I got a brown paper bag
  I'm putting it in and out in the back, you see
• I Am the Band: "Sincere Engineer" started as Deanna Belos' personal screen name she used on Instagram and other social media sites, which she carried over into her one-woman acoustic guitar act. Typically she now credits her bandmates as co-creators with equal status in the band to hers, especially for the second album where the songwriting was a collaborative process, but she still tours as a solo act under the Sincere Engineer name on occasion.
• Icarus Allusion: In "Keep You Company".
  I flew too close to the sun
  And now I'm burnt out
• Interrupted Suicide: The ending of the "Ceramic Tile" music video has Deanna somehow teleport into the open ocean by jumping into the wading pool in the backyard and seemingly begin to drown, only for some force to reverse time and send her back to the bathroom she woke up in.
• Life Embellished: Belos says her music is extremely autobiographical, saying with her usual Self-Deprecation she's "not creative enough" to do anything but put her life directly into her songs. Two of her songs in particular, however, talk extremely specifically about her life story — "Overbite" from Rhombithian is about her struggles in college and decision not to follow her life plan of pursuing a career as a dentist, and "Recluse in the Making" from Bless My Psyche tells the story of a typical day sometime after Rhombithian was released where she went to a local show to try to shake off her post-work depressive mood, found that being welcomed and celebrated by the crowd didn't do anything to lift it, and ended up blurting out her secret crush on a friend to her cab driver on the way home.
• Lonely Among People: "Recluse in the Making" describes Deanna's feelings of continuing to feel isolated and depressed even after having become a "darling of the Chicago punk scene".
• Lyrical Cold Open: "Corn Dog Sonnet No. 7", which is also a cold open for Rhombithian as a whole. "Trust Me" on Bless My Psyche plays with this, starting with Deanna giving a loud sigh of self-disgust before Adam's drumming plays her into the song.
• Lyrical Dissonance: The strongest example is "Shattering", which is a jaunty campfire-style anthem describing the singer's suicidal depression due to her feelings of worthlessness ("I'm gonna jump in Lake Michigan/And swim out as far as I can").
• Machinima: The music video of "Recluse in the Making" is a recreation of the day the song describes in The Sims 4.
• Male Band, Female Singer: Three male musicians backing up one female singer/songwriter. When Deanna first started working with them she said she felt very intimidated as a younger woman in the punk scene working with three male veterans, but at this point most of her fans would say they should've been the ones feeling intimidated and/or honored.
• Malapropism: "Bottle Lightning Twice" contains an intentional one, describing the speaker's desire to "see the thunder, hear the strike" instead of vice versa.
  • "Ghosts in the Graveyard" similarly swaps the beginnings and endings of two phrases with "There's plenty of fish in this graveyard/There's plenty of ghosts in the sea".
• Motifs: Rhombithian repeatedly makes references to drowning (with the cover art a photo of a young girl holding her nose underwater), and Bless My Psyche has a motif of being on a road.
• Nervous Wreck: The songs frequently joke about being one ("It's super nice out/But I'm too scared to leave my house/So I'll fall asleep on the couch") as a way of dealing with Deanna's Real Life anxiety disorder.
• Non-Indicative Name: Belos has said the name "Sincere Engineer" is a totally random coinage taken from listening to an interview with Brendan Kelly of The Lawrence Arms where he referred to an audio engineer who worked on one of his records as a "very sincere engineer", which was such an inherently funny phrase she adopted it as her online handle. She has disclaimed any interpretation of the band name as referring to her lyrics' sincerity or to herself as some kind of musical engineer.
  • The title of "Corn Dog Sonnet No. 7" is extremely tongue-in-cheek pretentiousness — the song is not a sonnet and it's not the seventh of anything (it's the first track of the album).
• Ode to Intoxication: "Ceramic Tile" is a (bitterly ironic) ode to the aftereffects of intoxication.
• Old, Dark House: The Surreal Music Video for "Out of Reach" shows Deanna apparently squatting in an abandoned mansion that's been stripped of its furniture, with the ironic dissonance of her sleeping on a mattress on the floor and eating cold cereal surrounded by opulent chandeliers and paintings.
• Pop Punk: A signature example of the "pop-punk revival" of The New '10s, although some would consider their sound to straddle pop punk and emo. Deanna Belos grew up a fan of Chicago punk acts like The Lawrence Arms and Alkaline Trio and wears her influences openly.
• Portal Door: The wading pool in the backyard in the "Ceramic Tile" video somehow turns into a portal into the open ocean when Deanna jumps into it.
• Precision F-Strike: They're scattered throughout the lyrics, but there's an especially notable one in "Screw Up", where one of these serves as a short and sweet transition into the bridge of the song.
  I'm gonna screw up... I'm gonna screw up again... FUCK!
• Reptilian Conspiracy: The Surreal Music Video for "Ceramic Tile" reveals that the rest of the family living with Deanna are apparently lizard people performing some kind of experiment on her.
• Rewind Gag: The "Ceramic Tile" music video ends with the camera reversing and bringing Deanna back to the bathroom floor she woke up on.
• Self-Deprecation: The lyrics are loaded with it, from ironically over-the-top ("Corn Dog Sonnet No. 7") to achingly heartfelt and sincere ("Trust Me"). Belos is also extremely prone to this in interviews and on social media.
  • One Running Gag of hers is deflecting the discomfort of being asked about the emotional meaning of her lyrics by giving Word of God interpretations of her songs that are extremely mundane and literal — "Tourniquet" is about "having really dry skin in the winter" ("And it's winter again/There's cracks in my skin/Nothing stops the bleeding"), "1K Rats" is "a song about barfing" ("Now I'm throwing up in the parking lot").
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The message the band members are passing around via Instant Messenger Pigeon in "Trust Me" turns out to just be spelling out the word "POOP".
• Shout-Out: The title of "Here's Your Two Dollars" is a reference to Better Off Dead.
  • The lyrics to "Corn Dog Sonnet No. 7" describe the singer "listen[ing] to the Brokedowns".
• The Shut-In: The songs frequently refer to Belos as one, with "Corn Dog Sonnet No. 7" joking about it in a celebratory way and "Recluse in the Making" being a much more painful and Played Straight look at it. Belos is diagnosed with general anxiety disorder in Real Life and has talked about the difficulty this gives her socializing and making friends.
• Siamese Twin Songs: "Tourniquet" ends on a long, piercing high note that segues directly into the intro of "Out of Reach".
• Singer-Songwriter: Sincere Engineer started as Deanna Belos as a singer-songwriter solo act, although she tried to subvert this trope from the beginning by writing songs more interesting than the Three Chords and the Truth stereotype and bringing punk rock energy to her vocals even if she couldn't bring a full band. Rhombithian happened largely because so much of her music was already ready to be translated into real punk rock with a full band.
• Singing Voice Dissonance: Not as extreme as some examples, but Deanna's speaking voice (which you can hear in the intro to "Ghosts in the Graveyard") is surprisingly high-pitched and bubbly compared to the voice she typically uses in lead vocals.
• Song Style Shift: "Tourniquet", the band's arguably most "progressive" or "experimental" track, which ends on a sudden shift into an upbeat, major-key outro that's purely an instrumental with no lyrics, as though the speaker was able to pull herself out of her depression in the end but can't put words to the process by which this happened. (The Surreal Music Video uses this section to depict Deanna regenerating a new body from her still-beating heart where it was torn out and thrown in a storm drain.)
• Soprano and Gravel: Hilariously, Deanna often does this with herself, contrasting her raw punk vocals as a lead singer with more traditional female vocals dubbed in as backup. (Cf. "Screw Up" on Rhombithian or "Hurricane of Misery" on Bless My Psyche.)
• Soul-Crushing Desk Job: Deanna's day job in "Recluse in the Making" is implied to be one of these.
• Studio Chatter: "Ghosts in the Graveyard" has a very brief out-of-context snippet of Deanna laughing and saying "I hate this!" before going into the song. The song then ends with a long passage of leaving the mic on while Deanna sets down her guitar and walks out of the studio, letting the door slam behind her.
• Surreal Music Video: Several of the band's music videos veer wildly in this direction, especially "Ceramic Tile", "Tourniquet" and "Out of Reach".
• There Are No Therapists: Played with. "Recluse in the Making" states that Deanna does have a therapist but that, unfortunately, she rarely actually tells them the truth about what her issues are.
• Unkempt Beauty: Unlike some influencers in the punk scene who make fashion and makeup part of their marketing, Deanna's "uniform" onstage and in videos is typically a plain pair of jeans and baggy black T-shirt with minimal makeup or hairstyling.
  • One of the funny details of the "Dragged Across the Finish Line" music video is how you can still tell the main character is Deanna despite having a trash can on her head because she's still dressed exactly the same, still wearing the same jeans — with her wallet and keys still in them! — while working out and running a race.
• Unusual Euphemism: An unusual dysphemism in "Hurricane of Misery", where the speaker's line "I wanna touch you with my mouth" somehow makes kissing sound much dirtier than it is.
• Victorious Loser: The theme of "Dragged Across the Finish Line"; taken up to eleven with the music video, parodying a sports movie with the Aesop that the "real prize" was Deanna and her Love Interest finding each other.
• Visual Pun: The video for "Dragged Across the Finish Line" barely qualifies as a pun, simply showing people running around with trash cans on their heads as a metaphor for feeling like "trash", although when Deanna posted this link on social media she threw in a pun for the caption ("It's trash CAN, not trash can't").

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