Body Meat, the alias of singer, songwriter and producer Chris Taylor, announces the forthcoming release of his debut album Starchris, out August 23rd on Partisan Records.
Starchris doesn’t simply deconstruct pop music’s conventions – it obliterates them – and with the fragments of chaos, complexity and curious elegance that remain, Body Meat develops a distinct sonic language that is entirely his own.
Partly influenced by the storytelling and intricate world-building potential of video games, the album follows a transformative hero’s journey from start to finish across 13 songs. He charts a trajectory through cut-scene-like moments and bosses of various difficulty levels, leading toward an ultimate moment of self-realisation and peace.
Sanding the edges of IDM, club music, experimental pop, trap, footwork and metal, Body Meat softens those edges into something remarkably warm and welcoming, finding catharsis amongst the chaos. Alongside the announcement, Body Meat unveils new single ‘High Beams’, the album’s trap-inflected first-level boss fight where pop melodies collide with waves of nu-metal.
Speaking on the track, he shares: “‘High Beams’ is about a programmer anxiously creating a game from within a cave. He codes all of the functionality, the rules and physics – every parameter to his liking. He then tries to instantiate himself into this world as a copy, but an oversight within his sloppy code work creates a bug within it. His instantiated copy is unable to be removed and begins hunting him. The programmer, terrified, tries to destroy the copy of himself. Nothing he does can stop the copy from moving towards him. He starts to realise he has done this before: the copy remembers him and knows that he has to warn the programmer who is cursed to write this code over and over again. Only the bugged copy can break the cycle.”
1. A Tone in The Dark
2. The Mad Hatter
3. High Beams
4. Electrische
5. Focus
6. Right Here
7. Crystalize
8. North Side
9. Starchris
10. Im In Pieces
11. Demons
12. Õbu No Seirei (Spirit of an Orb)
13. Paradise
Photo credit – Conor MacCormack