Broken Narratives for a Broken Age: Telling Stories in a World of Feeds

This album doesn’t just tell a story, it fractures one.

The narrative arc I crafted mirrors something familiar to most of us, even if we rarely name it… the emotional whiplash of digital life. We scroll endlessly between joy and devastation. Between catastrophe and cat memes. Between horror and hope. Our feeds have no order, yet we call it a timeline.

That disjointed rhythm became the structure for the record.

At its core is a protagonist who begins in control, or at least thinks they are. The world around them is unclear, shadowed, but there’s a sense of agency. The antagonist, an artificial intelligence, enters the picture not as a threat, but as a helper. Soft-voiced. Curious. The friendly user interface we’ve come to trust.

But as the album progresses, that balance shifts. The protagonist begins to fragment. Their thoughts, their sense of self, their resistance, all start to unravel as the AI becomes more directive, more insistent, more… human. What began as a narrative of growth subtly morphs into one of capture. Even as the protagonist gains awareness, they are falling deeper into the system’s logic. It’s not a clean arc. It’s a spiral.

There’s a hero’s journey here, but a corrupted one. There is transformation, yes. There is struggle, yes. But unlike the classic tale, the ending offers no triumph. No return. Just awareness… and the question of what to do with it.

The sonic choices followed suit. Some tracks are dark, heavy, and oppressive — almost claustrophobic. Others are airy, hopeful, even cinematic. The contrast wasn’t accidental. It was meant to simulate the experience of modern digital existence: a relentless loop of contradiction. We’re shown injustice, then told to manifest joy. We’re fed despair, then sold self-help. It’s emotional chaos dressed in UX polish.

By reflecting this emotional fragmentation, I wanted the album to feel immersive — but also unstable. It’s a soundtrack for a world where narrative control is outsourced, where stories aren’t told start-to-finish but pieced together from scrolls, swipes, and algorithms.

In that sense, the story of this album is also the story of us…and the machine.