"These Days" is about the particular suspension of not knowing what you feel. The narrator walks through a city, hears a truck grinding down the street, and keeps asking the same question: what should I do with this? The song argues that emotional numbness runs as its own slow drain, the fish floating in an empty tank, still technically alive, going nowhere.
You know that low hum of a day where nothing is actually wrong, but nothing is landing either? That is where "These Days" parks and stays. Slow Pulp builds the whole song around a mood that most writing skips over because it resists drama. The narrator is adrift in a city on an ordinary afternoon, somewhere past heartbreak and past anger, and the song's central argument is that this particular kind of lostness is worth naming, even if the name keeps slipping away.
The opening question sets the whole thing up: "Tell me how I'm supposed to feel / Is this part of the city life?" It is not rhetorical. The narrator genuinely wants instructions. They are scanning their environment for a cue and finding nothing useful, just concrete and movement and the ambient noise of other people's days.
Then comes the line the whole song hinges on.
"What should I do with this? Am I feeling lazy?"
That "this" is left completely open. No referent. The narrator cannot name what they are holding, only that they are holding it and do not know where to put it down. The self-diagnosis of laziness is the saddest possible reach, the brain trying to convert blankness into a character flaw because a character flaw would at least be something to fix. The walk in the park is not a solution. It is just motion, filling the afternoon with something that looks like purpose.
The chorus brings the only image that fully cracks the song open.
"It's sticking on the tip of my tongue / Just floating in an empty tank"
Two sensations at once: something about to emerge, and something suspended in a void. The tip-of-the-tongue feeling is the closest human experience to almost-but-not-quite, meaning is right there and won't surface. Then the tank image drops any pretense of imminence. The tank is empty. Whatever is floating in it has no medium to move through, no current, no life support. The feeling has not surfaced because the conditions for it to surface are gone. That is a different thing entirely from forgetting a word. It is closer to grieving something you cannot identify.
The second verse is weirder, and I think it is the better one. "Did you hear those noises like me?" is the narrator reaching sideways, checking whether someone else can confirm what they are registering. The truck on its way out is a strange little detail: mechanical failure heard from a distance, a thing running down. Then the question circles back.
"What should I do with this? Am I not that crazy?"
The shift from "Am I feeling lazy?" to "Am I not that crazy?" is the emotional movement of the whole song compressed into one swap. By verse two the narrator has quietly upped the stakes of self-interrogation. Not lazy, potentially unwell. And then immediately: "Am I, maybe?" The question folds back on itself. Even the uncertainty about being uncertain gets examined. The invitation to take a stroll around the park is also different now, directed outward, almost plaintive, like maybe company would help even if no one knows what kind of help is actually needed.
A fair reading of the song goes: this is just a vibe piece, a sketch of a slow afternoon, nothing more claimed. And the lyrics do leave that door open. The narrator never resolves anything, and Slow Pulp does not force the issue.
But the repetition of "what should I do with this?" is not accidental. That question is doing structural work. It appears in both verses at the same beat, the same note of genuine bewilderment. The song documents a mood and stages the experience of carrying something with no instruction manual and no one to ask. The city is indifferent. The truck is just on its way out. The park is just the park. Nothing external registers the weight of what the narrator is moving through, and that gap between interior weight and exterior blankness is exactly what the song is about.
The empty tank is the whole record in two words. Not drained by crisis. Empty in a way that makes motion possible but purposeless, going through the day without friction, without traction. "These Days" does not offer a way out of that feeling. It just confirms that someone else felt it clearly enough to write it down, and that turns out to be enough.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "These Days" by Slow Pulp about?
"These Days" is about emotional numbness and the disorientation of carrying a feeling you cannot name or act on. The narrator walks through a city asking what they are supposed to feel and getting no answer. The song argues that this kind of suspended, directionless state is its own form of suffering, not laziness, not breakdown, just a slow float through an empty day.
What does "floating in an empty tank" mean in "These Days"?
The image describes a feeling that has no medium to move through, something suspended with no current, no direction, and no support. Paired with the tip-of-the-tongue sensation in the same lyric, it captures the experience of a thought or emotion that almost surfaces but cannot quite break through. The tank being empty is the key detail: it rules out blockage and points instead to a total absence of the conditions needed to feel fully.
What does "what should I do with this?" mean in "These Days"?
The repeated question is the emotional core of the song. The narrator is carrying something they cannot identify or place and genuinely does not know what to do with the weight of it. The "this" is never named, which is the point: the feeling resists labeling. Each time the line appears, the self-diagnosis shifts slightly, from possibly lazy to possibly unwell, tracking the quiet escalation of confusion that comes from sitting too long with something unnamed.
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