He covers similar territory on “Spawn Kill,” growing despondent at the fatality of in-game, multiplayer rebirth. By pinning inadequacy onto them, Petty’s lyricism evokes a devastation that is familiar to the players we control as well. “Still I can’t compute your love/An illogical surrender/For me I’m just a computer/I receive I’m not the sender,” he sings on “NPC,” pivoting the focus onto the private lives of non-player characters. The two protagonists are the same, in that they are fighting against emotional turmoil, each transition relaying the transgressions of Petty’s own apathy under the disguise of different skins.īy focusing on the plights of fictional characters-private investigators, Undertale lookalikes, elven warriors, NPCs-Petty interrogates the limits of technological immersion and how it affects our perception. We transition then to the slow dissociation of “Spell Strike,” where the character’s defeatism takes shape as an RPG in a final level fight with an evil fairy boss, lamenting a metaphorical unrequited love.
On “Rose in a Glass,” Petty tells the story of a detective combing a noir-soaked city for a missing person there is no happy ending, only an unresolved swelling tension. The album revolves around a set of back-to-back tracks. Both songs race slurring vocals across a blistering drum machine, creating the illusion that our narrator is tethered to the front seat of a sports car in Gran Turismo but can’t help looking back. “Blue Sheen” meditates on losing faith in one’s ability to love another person “Bugs and Humans” oscillates between the perspective of a child and his adult self, mourning the mistakes that come with growing up. It’s jarring to see each transition accumulate torments that grow more sinister with each pop hook. The characters on the album are all projections of one person playing a video game, and each song is a new level with different faces but identical consequences. When Petty introduces warped vocals to the sinister backing tracks (made up of an amalgam of metal, punk, and UK trip-hop), he conjures visions of Echo and the Bunnymen in a mosh pit full of E-boys. The cover art looks like a still pulled from Videodrome or The Fly, and each song summons an accompanying car chase across a glistening cityscape. Made up of Lopez’s cultural mementos and Petty’s sometimes overwrought collection of 1980s motifs, the record fortifies itself with the past in order to engage with the present.
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