![]() ![]() This is what it feels like to be burned-out, peering out over the fringes of reality. Often, it’s unsettling – like a bad feeling you can’t shake. Sea Power worked in motifs and themes that match location and time, so even though you may wander through to a new area, hangovers of the previous zone stick around in your mind and cling onto your ears. Your struggling cop and his interminably loyal companion – the inspirational Kim Kitsuragi – bumble around the chilly coastal town, revisiting multiple areas often at different times of the day. “Yep, that’s the sound of a hangover,” you nod glumly, picking the responses you want to give to your body to rouse it from its inebriated slumber.Ī lot of the soundtrack’s beauty comes from its insistence on repetition. Somehow, Sea Power knows exactly what this would sound like (self-pitying, wallowing, goopy) and you don’t even question it. The second you boot up the game, your main character – so hungover he can’t even recall his own name – experiences an existential crisis so profound it’d make Nietzsche blush. Per the band’s bass guitarist and vocalist, Hamilton Wilkinson, the group basically ‘lived in someone else’s head’ when writing the music for the game, detaching themselves from Sea Power – with all their experiences of growing up and living in Britain – and instead going all ‘Christian Bale’ on us and getting a bit method.Īs a result, we get long, moping tracks that dwell in misery. ![]() It’s no surprise the OST won a BAFTA.īut why does Sea Power’s gloomy ode to the faded glory of Martinaise work so well? What is it about this sonic companion to a man wandering to the brink of madness and back that keeps me going back to my record player to spin the OST, sleeve to sleeve? It might be in how the band approached the brief. Sometimes meandering and melancholic, sometimes pent up with an unsettling menace, the orchestral swells and post-rock inspirations on Sea Power’s work on Disco Elysium is staggering. I’m willing to bet, even if you’d never played the game, you’d catch a whiff of this oppressive – yet achingly beautiful – world from the game’s OST. Local workers, destitute and stuck in this forgotten town, snatch moments of chemically-enhanced fun where they can get it, before the long winters and salty air call them back to consciousness. The setting of Martinaise – a working class district of a fictional post-failed Revolutionary state in a world that’s long past its prime – reeks of despair. Junkie kids, racist dockworkers, neo-liberal snobs and venture capitalists that are so rich their wealth bends light around them are all par for the course in Disco Elysium. The game – wrenched from the mind Robert Kurvitz, lead designer and writer at pan-European development outfit ZA/UM – focuses on an alcoholic detective embroiled in one of the messiest murder cases you’ll see in media. But none have fit the brief better than Sea Power. There have been many established artists that have gone on to make music for games ( these days, it’s a pretty damn cool thing to do). British Sea Power – or Sea Power now, dropping the nation prefix, so as not to come off all jingoistic – has always been a band that embraces the miserable alongside the beautiful. It was extolling the virtues of being an EU citizen. It was penning beautiful, atmospheric tracks about obscure bodies of water in Orkney. The band was writing music about the slow, perilous collapse of the planet as ice shelves slid into the ocean. ![]()
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