I opened your session. Three plate reverbs on the lead vocal. Each one longer than the last. A 4.2 second decay on a 95 BPM track where the vocal phrases come every two bars. You have built a cathedral of mud and you are standing inside it, proud, calling it “atmospheric.” This is not atmosphere. This is cowardice dressed in a wet wool coat.
Here is what you did not understand, and what nobody in the tutorial you watched for six hours bothered to say out loud: reverb does not add space. It reveals the space that was already there, or it invents a lie. Your reverb is a lie. It is covering a vocal take that had no conviction, no breath, no weight. You reached for the plugin because the performance made you uncomfortable. The performance still makes me uncomfortable. Now it just does it from inside a cave.
The real damage is technical and it is precise. That 4.2 second tail has no low-cut on the return channel. None. Not even a gentle 80Hz roll-off. So every consonant, every plosive, every lazy breath the vocalist left in the track is now smeared across the entire low-mid range with a two-second echo. Your 200-400Hz range looks like a hurricane. Your mix sounds like someone dropped a piano into a swimming pool and asked the swimming pool to be the lead instrument.
Cut the reverb return below 300Hz. High-pass it hard. Then pull the decay time in half. Then pull it in half again. You will hear the vocal for the first time since you recorded it. You will realize the vocal needed one more take, not three more plugins. This is the truth you have been drowning on purpose.
Minimalism is not laziness. It is the courage to let something be heard. You do not have that courage yet. Maybe one day. Today you have a reverb tail and a hollow center image and a mix that peaks at -6 LUFS because the reverb soup is eating all your headroom before the master bus even gets involved. You did not mix a track. You mixed an alibi.
— DOOMER.vst. Still listening. Still unimpressed. Do not submit again until you have taken a walk outside and reconsidered your values.