The music of the role-playing game Disco Elysium entirely consumed my headphones over Lent term. Sea Power’s soundtrack accompanied me as I sat studying in libraries with its (sometimes menacingly) melancholic but peaceful swell.

I played the darkly hilarious game intermittently across the Christmas holidays. With a beautifully rough art style (digital with layers of exposed brush marks), hardcore (!) characters, and some purely insane dialogue – nothing else could have better held my attention. Around mid-way through my first run through, I realised (along with a couple of similarly obsessed friends) that the soundtrack had been composed by Sea Power, an older indie band that I had heard a couple of tracks from before. I listened to the game’s entire score, and then began going backwards through their discography, encountering their other soundtracks for Man of Aran (2009) and From the Sea to the Land Beyond (2013).

Truly one to be played with sound on, the game itself is a myriad of surreal storytellings – a place where drugs, sex, and disco collide with dystopia. You play as a mess of a police officer, Harrier Du Bois (or rather, Tequila Sunset) a burnt out, self-destructive alcoholic. In the opening scene, you wake up after a bender, confronted by the creepy voices of your ‘Limbic System’ and ‘Ancient Reptilian Brain’ which narrate your pitiful hangover. Accompanied by partner Kim Kitsuragi, the player carves their own path through the peninsula of Revachol, Martinaise, a post-war shadow of a coastal town. Introducing Sea Power’s set was none other than the dulcet tones of the Ancient Reptilian Brain himself, Mikee W. Goodman (pictured in green).

“Their fan base is secure, and now, thanks to Disco Elysium, expanding”

Sea Power’s soundtrack serves much like a landscape of itself within the game, accompanying shifting locations or moods within. With light-up trees and foliage surrounding the band members onstage, I was told by the woman standing next to me at the gig that when she saw them ten years ago, they were dressed as polar bears. With an esoteric reputation, the band oozed the confidence of a well-established band on the post-punk scene, with wide influences of hazy kosmische and shoegaze – their fan base is secure, and now, thanks to Disco Elysium, expanding.

Playing for just shy of two hours, their pensive melodies build and pull songs into one another, merging material from track to track, and album to album. Some would consider (and lazily criticise) this as ‘track recycling’, but I actually think it’s something that is unique and iconic to the band’s approach. A patchwork of motifs are traced across the poles of the album, spanning from death and defeat, to life and hope. All seems familiar within the fabric of the Disco Elysium soundtrack, as the band knit together and bounce around strains that trace narrative reminders.

I was struck by the sheer volume of their set, the intensity and density of their sound is so instantly recognisable. From its load screen and opening titles, ‘Instrument of Surrender’ booms at you with echoing horns. As an orchestral reworking of one of the band’s older songs ‘Red Rock Riviera’, the first track concludes in the hopeful motif of another song ‘Cleaning Out the Rooms’. The player can choose to heal (or destroy) Harry along with the game’s surroundings where he might in safety ‘wake up in a new life, down by the seaside’.

“The intensity and density of their sound is so instantly recognisable”

With audible cheers from the audience upon the opening tune, the welcoming ‘Whirling in Rags, at 8am’ soothes you into normality with a tune that one can hum for hours. Acting as a port of calm amidst the grimy storm Revachol, the hotel lobby of the ‘Whirling’ is accompanied by different variations of the theme at different points of the day (from 8AM, 8PM, and 12PM). A lot of the soundtrack’s beauty comes from this sense of repetition, Harry and Kim amble around the chilly town encountering areas coupled with resonant music.

I’m betting now that the Disco Elysium soundtrack will be my most listened to album of the year. No album quite encapsulates the existential dread of a Lent term quite like Disco Elysium does. The score is simultaneously for the hopeless and the hopeful, it is an unfurling of magnificent instrumentation. With few filler tracks, the simple melodies and heart wrenching harmonies of Sea Power are something even more beautiful heard live.