I don’t know much about mixing records. It’s a dark art full of multi-band EQs, side chain compression, transient shaping, and the many choices of reverbs and delays.
But I know one thing.
Not everything can be the loudest.
The snare and guitars and synths and vocals and thumping bass can’t all be the loudest.
At any given moment in a song the mix engineer has to choose what the rest of the mix is revolving around. There are a lot of essential elements and instrumentation that need to be part of the underlying mix in order to support the thing main thing.
Because if you try to make everything the loudest, nothing is the loudest.
As a metaphor it holds up for lots of other applications.
