Megan James and Corin Roddick enter the void on "Purity Ring"—"the first in a new era for us," James says: Photo by Lloyd Galbraith and yuniVERSEPurity Ring is a video game now.
At least an imaginary role-playing game is what inspired the self-titled fourth record from the outré electronica duo of Corin Roddick and Megan James, and “Purity Ring” is the soundtrack to the pair’s “journey to build a kinder world amid the ruins of a broken one,” according to the album announcement.
"Purity Ring," the self-titled fourth record from James and Roddick, was released on September 26 via the duo's own label, Fellowship: Photo by yuniVERSEWhen Roddick and James got together for their initial writing session for the new record, Roddick brought a handful of sonic ideas with him. James reflects that their first three records—full of body horror permutations and witchy beats—are “like a trilogy in their own right, and exist together. And this is the first in a new era for us.”
These little snippets served as jumping off points to start creating new music, “and as soon as we started to develop those a little bit further—like the first four or five potential song ideas we had—they all had this certain flavor about them that had this nostalgic RPG [spirit]. It gave me a lot of visuals of like running through a field with a sword or something,” Roddick laughs. With “childhood nostalgia flashing back before my eyes,” the direction for the album became clear.
“Pretty early on in the process of writing these songs, we more deliberately acknowledged in each other that we’re both gamers,” James adds. “We’d never really grasped this fact about us that has been true throughout our lives. We have a similar experience with how we grew up and associated with these RPGs.”
On the music front, the “Zelda” franchise was hugely influential, especially all the ocarina music, Roddick says. “All those ocarina melodies stand on their own. You can just get them stuck in your head as an individual melody without the rest of the song. I think that’s a sign of a great melody, when it can exist on its own.”
On the RPG side of it, “NieR: Automata” and “Final Fantasy X” served as muses, with the latter being a game that provided “a crazy feeling” and “experience that stuck with me the most,” Roddick recalls.
“Looking back at the music we’ve made over the last 10, 15 years, there’s always been touchpoint references [to video games] there: like that little melody or that type of synth sound, that flute sound or something. That inspiration has always kind of been below the surface a little bit,” Roddick explains. With “Purity Ring,” they decided to “see how deep into that we can go.”
Purity Ring collaborated with designers and animators Mike Sunday and Steve Teeps to develop anime versions of themselves and the world in which these avatars live, which will continue to expand on stage and online.The record’s tracklist reads like levels of the duo’s digital quest, and various songs give off specific vibes that propel the story’s arc forward.
“We talked about the environment that the songs existed in a lot,” James describes. For example, they sought to capture the feeling of “the moment where you leave the little village or the cave, and you’re running in an open field. That feeling is a thing we tried to achieve in a number of songs. But then there’s a few songs that feel more like the beginning where you’re still in the womb. We really thought about the record in terms of the stages you go through when you are playing a game.”
“Obviously, the characters are us because we’re writing the songs and it’s coming from us,” she continues. “I think that expands this world into reality. We’re building this world, but we’re also dreaming of the place that we want to exist in when we make art.”
While the concept may be rooted in fantasy, real-world—and personal—experiences naturally influenced James’ lyrics. “The stories that we choose to experience when we enter a game are true of life,” she says. “You’re always like fighting empires” and the powers that be or the status quo. So it’s “not necessarily a fantasy to me,” she shares, because we live in a world where there’s ableism and military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes.
Alongside the soundtrack, “Purity Ring” comes with two anime avatars of Roddick and James, and they’ll keep developing “a visual language that is like the world of the album,” Roddick says. The live show is the “next evolution of the story as well. We’re continuing with a lot of those elements and that feels like the next chapter in how the story evolves visually.” Specifically, he says, “we are experimenting with these crazy holographic, spinning blade screens.”
“They’re like the enemy overhead,” James adds, laughing. Get a sneak peek of these interactive elements in the music video for "The Long Night" below.
Purity Ring’s concerts have always employed engaging onstage components. “That’s been a continuing theme,” Roddick says. “For every album and tour we go on, we build a different reactive, trigger, lighting-based instrument that’s used to perform the main synth elements from the song.” Meanwhile, James contributes stage-ready outfits that are individually designed and sewn by her.
For this fall tour, the live sets will feature “reactive elements based upon triggered things from us performing and cameras and MJ’s vocals that will be feeding into these visuals in real time and be different day to day in a very organic way,” Roddick says.
The floating “Glacier,” the record’s closing song, is subtitled “in memory of rs.” It’s an homage to Ryuichi Sakamoto, the famed Japanese musician and composer (who also dabbled in video game music including penning the Sega Dreamcast startup sound), who passed away in 2023.
Meanwhile, the hauntingly stripped-down album opener “Relict” aurally embodies the word’s definition (a surviving species of an otherwise extinct group of organisms) and perfectly sets up the record’s concept with an embryonic phase. But the 10-second symphonic chime that precedes it, as the album boots up, is the chef’s kiss—listen below.
Purity Ring's Corin Roddick and Megan James embodying their RPG alter egos, IRL: Photo by yuniVERSEWhether it’s Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation, Windows or even Netflix’s modern-yet-iconic tudum, “In my memory, that is always the thing that separates from your daily life to when you engage with one of these video games,” Roddick recounts. “When you hear that every day, over and over again, it creates such a nostalgic feeling.”
“It was actually the very last thing we added to the album,” he shares. The duo asked themselves, “What is the one thing that will leave an impression right off the bat and sort of be this transportive element? It really came together in the couple days before we sent it for mastering.”
The opening notes of “Part II” also give off classic Windows startup feels, a sound that “almost hypnotizes you,” he says. “When you’re used to hearing that every time, it’s like: Snap your fingers and now you’ve transported.”
Start the quest and immerse yourself in Purity Ring’s world.
