You know Megan McDuffee, even if you don’t know her. As a prolific video game and film composer, gamers have likely seen her name on any number of games, as have many movie buffs. Most notably, the Seattle-based artist has scored the popular River City Girls game series, for which she won multiple awards, Star Trek: Progeny, and a number of SneakyBox’s Recharged Atari games like Black Widow and Centipede. As most music and gaming fans know, game and film scores are extremely high quality, so it follows that when a composer decides to release their own work, it will also be done to an extremely high standard. This is of course the case with McDuffee, and luckily her chosen genre is electronic music.
McDuffee’s sophomore album, Crimson Legacy, is due out on 11th October and runs the gamut of style and genre. With a generally dark and goth flavour, the tracks on the album traverse industrial, electropop, techno and darkwave. She also sings all the lead vocals on the album, with a rich yet high-pitched, almost angelic timbre which would be in direct contrast to all the dark tones. With the way she writes and sings the vox, however, everything comes out sultry and sinful. A fallen angel, perhaps. It helps that the lyrics are often equally sinful. McDuffee has teased a couple of these stunners so far and they’re already extremely popular, with the deep, lush techno track ‘Your Demise’ already racking up nearly 200k streams on Spotify and the lyric video for the darkwave/pop fusion ‘Forgive Me’ being suitably creepy to usher in spooky season.
With Crimson Legacy set to drop tomorrow, McDuffee will also release a music video for ‘Your Demise’, but she’s given Kmag a special premiere exclusive with the album’s opening single, ‘Lovely Psycho’. Another haunting darkwave mélange, ‘Lovely Psycho’ introduces the listener to McDuffee’s vampiric and cinematic world of heavy synths and sine wavey distortion that’s somehow both warped and technically clean. Lyrically, this track is also meant to introduce the album’s concept: an homage to cult film. She describes it best herself:
With ‘Crimson Legacy,’ I wanted to capture the surrealness and essential weirdness of the 1970’s – 1990’s movies I grew up with. Films like Labyrinth, Dark City, Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, Legend, A Clockwork Orange, and Rocky Horror Picture Show. They all had a quintessential darkness, griminess, and strangeness to them that transported me to a realm of dreams and nightmares. That’s what I aim to do with my album – to take the listener into an edgy, disturbing-yet-alluring fever dream filled with lust, revenge and whimsy. ‘Crimson Legacy’ is for all my fellow weirdos, witches, warlocks, and creatures of the dark corners of the earth.
Crimson Legacy drops tomorrow, 11th October and can be pre-saved on Spotify or pre-ordered on Bandcamp. Check out Megan McDuffee’s other videos and the premiere of ‘Your Demise’ tomorrow on her YouTube channel.