I've been a fan of Emperor X ever since the first time I heard the fascinating lyrics of Erica Western Teleport. It's exciting to see Emperor X drop a new album. I managed to find a great review of the album which goes into fascinating detail about Chad Matheny's work on this album, which was done in Ukraine during the war.
On the Bandcamp for this album:
This album was recorded in The Palace of Culture in Kremenchuk (Ukraine), Kaska Family Studio in Kharkiv (Ukraine), Juno’s Lair in Kyiv (Ukraine), Trisha and Zyava’s Lair in Brieskow-Finkenheerd (Germany), Candyland in rural Devon (UK), Donau115 in Berlin (Germany), The Heights Theater Studios in Cleveland (USA), and Studio Red in Los Angeles (USA) during the winter of 2025 except for 6, which was recorded in the summer of 2021 at Extrapool in Nijmegen (Netherlands).
He also has more detailed notes for this album in particular:
This song was recorded mostly on the top floor of a northern district of Kharkiv in a building that was by fortunate coincidence spared from the nearly-constant power cuts the city suffered when I was there. I will never forget hearing air defense firing a few blocks away outside of the window while i was recording the bass line. I was twenty kilometers away from a fault line cutting across the former Soviet Union between two clashing ideas of what human beings are – the feudal subject of Russian imperialism vs. the liberal citizen of Ukraine and the European Union.
We in the West frequently ignore the authoritarian dimension to Russia's war on Ukraine. These are not neighbors fighting over a property line. They are neighbors fighting over whether the very idea of property lines -- the very idea that power can be subordinate to rule of law -- matters. It is every bit as big of a philosophical split as that between free market capitalism and command economy socialism during Cold War, but our civic vocabulary lacks the right terms. I tried to sketch out this philosophical split in lyric form and wound up with this song, a joyfully confused anti-anthem for a hypothetical humanist pluralist Keynesian welfare state that I hope can one day come into being. Realizing I had written some fun but very unclear lines, I put a Greek chorus in the bridge so the song could literally explain itself. Even this is constrained by rhythm and imagery, but in a way that I found compelling enough to justify playing extensively with musical gestures that I hope contribute to the rush I get when I think about the future. Markets can have both liberatory and constraining effects on a society, and dogmatic assumptions about the inherent virtue or vice of markets too often cripple humanity's striving towards utopias. At the same time, advocates for bold humanist utopias are too often crippled by defeatist passivism masquerading as principled pacifism. DO IT!
I find this track fascinating and invigorating. During the last decade there's been a lot of conversations about how there are not enough protest songs meeting the moment. I think they generally underestimate what makes a protest song; there's more than they think. However, I do agree that there aren't many that are quite as explicit, or energetically, opposed to the status quo as this song and clear about what they are trying to say (Chad Matheny's chorus/narrator sequence does indeed go into political detail). Or some of the other tracks on this album.
I have purchased tickets to Emperor X's swing through NYC, and can't wait to hear this album live.
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