Imagery Originality
Fresh metaphors, defamiliarized objects, governing images that haven't been written to death.
What good looks like
Images that surprise on first read and deepen on second. No shattered hearts, no oceans of tears, no wings of freedom.
How SongForgeAI scores it
87-term banned-cliché scanner runs post-generation; panel evaluates novelty on surviving imagery. The scanner is the floor ("no neon, no tapestry, no whispered echoes"); panel decides whether what's left is fresh or just unbanned.
Example score
79/100on this metric"The exits go by faster than they should"
WhyFamiliar object (highway exit) reframed as the agent of memory. Survives the cliché scanner. Earns the line because the speaker is in motion but emotionally still — the contradiction does the lifting.
One representative example. Real scores carry a reproducibility seal — verify at /scoring/standard.
Common failure mode
Reaching for the ready-made metaphor shelf: hearts as glass, love as fire, time as a river.
What it looks like in the wild
- A governing image that threads through the song without being named as a metaphor.
- A familiar object seen from an angle that makes it strange again.
- Imagery specific enough that it couldn't be lifted out and dropped into a different song.
Why it’s in the Expression tier
Does it say something worth hearing? Specificity, originality, truth, and voice.
The Expression tier contributes 40% to the final composite score. The tier weight is distributed across its member metrics — no single metric dominates the composite.
Other Expression metrics
Lyrical Specificity
#5Concrete imagery, sensory detail, proper nouns, time anchors. The opposite of abstract generalities.
Emotional Truth
#7The ring-test: does it feel true? Earned emotion, unforced vulnerability, no borrowed sentiment.
Voice & POV Integrity
#8Narrator consistency, perspective clarity, and a credible speaker. Does this sound like one person talking?
The full rubric
Related reading
What "specificity" actually means in a lyric
Image System Coherence overlaps with specificity — the "concrete images that carry narrator information" test applies to both.
Read the essayPublishing the Lyric Scoring Standard v1.0
The rubric itself, open-sourced under CC BY 4.0.
Read the essayWhy the default score is 50, not 75
Why the Gravity Rule keeps every metric honest.
Read the essayAnatomy of a Forge: one song from prompt to final score
See this metric scored on a real forge run, alongside all 11 others.
Read the essaySee this metric scored against real songs
Every song forged through SongForgeAI is scored on Imagery. Browse the leaderboard or forge your own to see how lines land on this axis.