Hello to all those who are visiting us via recommendation from the ALMIGHTY ALGORITHM!

Bingers is in Melbourne, Pete is in Brisbane and Pluto is in Woollongong.

We’ve been recording an album via Zoom every Wednesday night for the past 18 months. We spend half the sessions talking about AI and how bizarre the world is, and the other half working on songs.

The days of slumming it in the clubs are gone and the party is now over!

DIGITAL GLOW

"Screen to screen, together alone in the digital glow."

While the time and place are contemporary, the theme is ageless. Longing, yearning, desperate. One theme of our album is that while everything changes, nothing changes.

Whether we're living in the stone age, or the distant future - our intimate connections and the relationships we need to survive will always be a part of what it means to be human.

SLOW MOTION

APOCALYPSE

Can you feel it/over the horizon/underneath the ocean?

The end is coming. One way or another, it’s getting closer. Humanity is creating one existential threat for itself after another – and the giant eraser of nature is ready to clean up the mess we’ve made of things.

We can face it/huddled up together/better late than never

So many problems, like climate change, seem like tragedies of the commons where we could figure them out if we stopped acting as individuals and starting thinking more collectively. Maybe this time we will, but eventually it won’t be enough. At some indeterminate point in the future, the last people will hold each other close and say their final goodbyes. We got this far by sticking together, and that’s what will take us right up to the bitter end.

Even stars die/solar systems scatter/nothing really matters

Zooming out a bit further, everything has an expiration date. As Nick Cave put it: ‘a star is just a memory of a star’. If you’re looking for permanence in anything, you will be disappointed.

Look me in the eye/are you afraid to die?

What does it matter if the Sun swallows up the Solar System if we’re not around to see if anyway? Because that’s the thing – even if the human race figures out climate change, cures cancer, and declares world peace forever, and even if we’re wrong about the fate of the universe, there’s a more immediate end to consider. We will all die one day, and that end is only getting closer.

In slow motion

When something that’s moving towards you is far away, it doesn’t even look like it’s moving. But as it gets closer, it seems to speed up. The thing is though, it was going the same speed the whole time. And that’s how the end is coming – in slow motion.

BORN AGAIN

We live in a world where truth has been hijacked by identity. Partisan battlelines are drawn so sharply that we have our own facts and morals. These change all the time, but because the stakes feel so high, instead of challenging our leaders we fall into line, accepting doublethink because it’s easier than admitting the other side is right. We know we’re being lied to and we lap it up.

Now I think of you fondly/Just like how I did before

Of course, different countries have always had different truths—think about the politics of the ‘Spanish’ flu, or wartime propaganda in the world wars. To a certain degree, truth is socially constructed. But now we can see it play out in real time, with access to both sides. We can read CNN and Fox News back to back and marvel at the total disconnect. We can check back and see that indeed, our Prime Minister or President said one thing last week and a totally different thing this week, and there’s no way that the two statements could possibly be true. But yet, we accept this lunacy as justified and necessary.

The voice is coming back to me/It always does/Lying, trying, testifying/It wants to be heard on my speakers

The problem comes from backing ourselves into a corner where to be wrong as a group means to lose as an individual. Increasing polarisation leads to a zero-sum world where every action is either a win or a loss, and our identification with one side or the other means that it’s not just our actions that live in this nightmarish cage fight, but those of our fellow group members as well—and particularly our leaders. If someone we identify with on the other side of the world ‘loses’, we lose—which means we need to perform whatever mental gymnastics are required to make it so that we win instead. A demonstration by ‘our side’ turns into a violent riot? The rule of law is illegitimate. Our leader cosies up to our bitter overseas enemy? They must be our friends now. We said one thing yesterday and a different thing today? They must both be true.

I think that I’ve been born again/Hyperbole—it don’t mean much to me/I tell the honest truth/I always do—and now’s no time to fake it

War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength — we’ll swallow whatever is required for us to win the zero-sum game.