Albums Four And Five Status Update

Yep, you heard right. My band, Second Player Score, is currently in the process of writing our fourth and fifth albums at the same time. I'll tell you how that came to be.

For a while now, even as our third album Glorified was being recorded, we'd been working on songs for the follow-up, which was to be titled 200BPM, named after the tempo that a lot of Second Player Score songs seem to be played at.

But somewhere along the way, especially after hearing how "More Than I Can Give" - an uptempo punk rock track off of Glorified - turned out, we decided that we needed a whole album full of short, speedy, simple tunes that evoked images of spiky hairdos and sweaty mosh pits. And, being the nerdy fans of numerology that we are, we decided that said album would have to be our fourth album, since it would contain nothing but four-chord songs a la Face to Face's "Disconnected."

On top of that, since - as you know - all we write are concept albums, we came up with a related storyline that would be sort of a mashup of Pokemon and Battle Royale that would involve elemental guardians, parallel threads of reality, and the ability to see into - naturally - the fourth dimension.

And thus, Four-D was born. It might well be our most ambitious project to date, because not only is there the album, but, like Glorified, there are plans for a related comic book and another product that I'll go into more detail on in a future Album Four Status Update post.

But what about 200BPM? Well, we certainly didn't want to abandon that project, especially since we had already written the music for a lot of it and even recorded one of its songs in the studio. So, it was decided that it would not only become our fifth album, but that we would have to work on it simultaneously with Four-D in order to keep the songs fresh in our minds and not waste all the time we had put into practicing them up until that point.

And so, that's the story of how we got ourselves into this particular predicament. But, hey, challenge accepted, right? At the moment, we have the music written for all 16 (four times four, of course) songs on Four-D, and 9 of the 13 planned songs on 200BPM. Next up are the lyrics, then vocal harmonies, then boot camp.

Oh, and what is the concept behind 200BPM, you ask? Well, the original idea was sort of a psychological horror anthology in the vein of Black Mirror, but then after I realized that no one can really out-Black Mirror Black Mirror, it morphed into the story of a female serial killer who considers her murders to be, essentially, performance art. It's kind of a cross between Killing Eve and Dexter, two of our favorite shows.

Anyway, stay tuned!