The gauntlet pass — the targeted revision step that runs after the initial score — doesn't just rewrite weak lines. It flags them, categorizes them, and explains why each one tanks the composite. After running the gauntlet on roughly 5,000 lyrics this year, the failure modes cluster into 12 archetypes. Here they are, in roughly the order of how often they show up.

1. The closing platitude

"All I need is love." "This is my truth." "Love wins." A line that resolves the song with a generic emotional summary using one of the platitude patterns documented in RFC-0002. Tank cost: Specificity drops to the 12-20 band, Voice drops 8-15 points, Truth drops 5-10. Recovery: replace the abstraction with a named anchor. "All I need is the key under the planter, the one she said she'd leave for me" is the same emotional move with a real referent.

2. Adjective overload

"The lonely echoing whispers in the dark cold night." Six adjectives, two nouns, zero specific referents. Tank cost: Imagery Originality 30s, Specificity 30s, Voice 50s. Recovery: every adjective is a confession that the noun isn't doing enough work. Strip three adjectives and replace with one specific image.

3. Genre cosplay

A pop song wearing a country song's costume (mentions of dirt roads, mama, beer, trucks) without any of the country song's structural commitments (named place, narrator with a stance, AAB stanza). Tank cost: Genre-Fit 40-50 because the rubric reads costume-adjacency as inauthentic. Recovery: pick the genre actually being written, drop the cosplay vocabulary.

4. Pre-chorus too thin

The two bars before the chorus exist but don't earn the chorus. The rubric's Pre-Chorus deriver flags any pre-chorus that's mechanical filler rather than emotional escalation. Tank cost: Structure 50s. Recovery: the pre-chorus's job is to make the chorus feel inevitable. If you can swap it for an instrumental break and the song doesn't lose anything, the pre-chorus wasn't doing work.

5. POV drift mid-song

Verse 1 is in second person ("you walked in the kitchen..."). Verse 2 is in third person ("she walked in the kitchen..."). Without a deliberate flip, this is a Voice & POV Integrity failure. Tank cost: Voice 30-50 depending on severity. Recovery: pick a POV. Stay in it. Or flip POVs deliberately and SHOW the flip happening.

6. The borrowed image

"Neon shines on empty streets." "Whispers in the dark." "Echoes of the past." "Tapestry of memories." Lines drawn from the saturated stock-imagery pool. The rubric's banned-terms catalog (87 entries) automatically deducts; the gauntlet's deeper image-recognition catches another tier of borrowed imagery. Tank cost: Imagery Originality 30-50 + automatic 5-10 point composite ding. Recovery: trade the saturated image for something local, time-marked, sensory.

7. Detail-balance failure

Three concrete nouns in a row turns the lyric into a list. Three abstract feelings in a row makes it float. Hit songs alternate. The Detail Balance deriver flags any 4+ line span that's all-concrete or all-abstract. Tank cost: Detail Balance metric scores in the 40s; composite drops 3-5 points. Recovery: alternate. Specific noun, then a feeling pinned to it, repeat.

8. The contradicting bridge

The verses are about loss. The chorus is about loss. The bridge says "but I'm fine now." Tank cost: Theme coherence 40s — the song is making contradictory claims and the rubric reads this as a thesis problem. Recovery: pick one thesis. The bridge can complicate it, deepen it, even invert it — but it needs to be ABOUT the same emotional argument the verses + chorus are making.

9. Stress cluster

"The dark, cold, lonely, broken-hearted night." Five stresses in seven syllables. The natural meter fights itself. Tank cost: Prosody 40s. Recovery: read the line aloud. Clap the meter. If your hand can't find the beat, the singer's tongue can't either.

10. Naming the wrong thing

Specificity isn't just "have a proper noun." It's "have the RIGHT proper noun." A song about leaving a town that names the wrong town — or a chain restaurant where a local diner would land — trips the Specificity deriver. The rubric reads correctness of naming as part of the metric. Tank cost: Specificity 50s when the named anchor doesn't carry the weight it should. Recovery: name the place that sounds like the place. Not the place that's famous.

11. Chorus as thesis statement

The chorus IS the song's thesis — in the sense that it carries the most repetition and the most listener attention. But "chorus as thesis" can mean writing the chorus as a literal thesis sentence: "I miss you and I'm sad about it." Tank cost: Memorability 30-40 + Imagery Originality 30s. Recovery: a thesis can be implied. The chorus of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" never says "I am lonely." It says "the silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky."

12. The unearned twist

Verse 1 + Verse 2 set up a story. Bridge or last verse pivots to a radically different emotional or factual claim that nothing earlier has earned. Tank cost: Arc metric 40-50. Recovery: every twist needs a setup. If you can't find a line in the first two verses that makes the twist make sense, either remove the twist or rewrite the early verses to seed it.

What the gauntlet does about it

The targeted revision pass reads the wound list, picks the most-fix-able category (the one with the most flagged lines + the highest expected composite lift), and rewrites only those lines. The lyrics keep their voice; the failures get cleaned up. Average lift on a typical 65-input draft: +19 points. /refine is the user-facing surface for this. /forge runs the gauntlet inline as part of the full pipeline.

The point of cataloging the failure modes isn't to make any particular lyric look bad. It's to make the rubric's behavior legible. When you know what tanks the score, you know what to look for in your own drafts before you ever put them through a tool.

12 lyric mistakes the gauntlet catches (and why they tank your score)