Purity Ring is now a video game. Or, at least an imaginary RPG (role-playing game) that inspired the self-titled fourth record from the outré electronica duo of Corin Roddick and Megan James. According to them, their latest is the soundtrack to the pair’s “journey to build a kinder world amid the ruins of a broken one.”
James considers their first three Purity Ring albums—full of body horror permutations and witchy beats—to be, he said, “like a trilogy in their own right and exist together. And this is the first in a new era for us.”
When Roddick and James got together for their initial writing session for this self-titled record, Roddick brought a handful of sonic ideas with him. These little snippets served as jumping-off points to start creating new music.
“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 [role playing game] spirit. It gave me a lot of visuals of like running through a field with a sword or something,” Roddick said with a laugh in a recent interview, noting that with “childhood nostalgia came flashing back before [his] 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 added. “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 Legend of Zelda franchise was hugely influential, especially all the ocarina music. “All those ocarina melodies stand on their own,” Roddick said. “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 Roddick said provided him with a “crazy feeling” that has stuck with him the most.
“Looking back at the music we’ve made over the last ten or fifteen 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 explained. With Purity Ring, he and James decided to see how deep into that subject they could go.
The record’s track list 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 said. For example, Roddick and James 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,” she said. “That feeling is a thing we tried to achieve in several songs. But then there are 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 continued. “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 also naturally influenced James’ lyrics. “The stories that we choose to experience when we enter a game are true of life,” she said.
Purity Ring’s concerts have always employed engaging onstage components, and that’s true of the current show.
“That’s been a continuing theme,” Roddick said. “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.”
Purity Ring plays the Ritz, San Jose, on Sat, April 18, at 7pm.
