Purity Ring break their own rules on their self-titled reset
The pioneers of future pop threw out the blueprint on their just-released concept album, bringing fun and freedom back into their music.
When Canadian duo Purity Ring arrived, they struck like a meteor. Their 2012 debut album Shrines delivered one of the songs of the decade (‘Belispeak’) and spawned a cottage industry of ‘future pop’ imitators. It was boundary-pushing electronica: Corin Roddick’s arctic synth-driven production bounced against Megan James’ (mj) spacious vocals, creating an intoxicating sound that was both intimate and distant.
Since then, Roddick and mj have reshaped Purity Ring over and over like an origami crane. They’ve embraced thumping pop hooks (‘Bodyache’), sped up the tempo (‘unlucky’) and drifted into soft psychedelia (‘femia’).
But there’s only so far you can take a sound, even when you’re a pioneer, and the pair knew it.
“The sound that we started on Shrines evolved and grew and went to a lot of different places by the time we did our third record Womb, but we still had the same kind of building blocks from the beginning,” Roddick tells me over Zoom.
“It felt like, by the end of that record, that we had — from my perspective — fully explored what was possible there.”
To usher in a new era, Roddick and mj escaped to the mountainous Idyllwild region of California for a writing trip. It’s a way of working that has yielded results since their second album Another Eternity, after completing their debut over the internet.
“Within the first few days that we were out there, we already had most of the ideas that would become the majority of the songs on the album,” Roddick says. “It really presented itself right away.”
mj sets the scene: “We were in a literal cloud for a lot of it. Like, the mountain is often in a cloud. At night, there were acorn trees around the cabin, and so they would fall on the roof, hundreds of them, everywhere. And I was like, ‘Are there squirrels? Like, what’s going on?’ But I mean, maybe squirrels, maybe rats, who knows? It definitely felt like it wasn’t here.”
The atmosphere was evocative of a fantasy world, a fitting foundation for the record that resulted — Purity Ring, a brave self-titled reset. Released last month, Purity Ring is a concept album designed to soundtrack a video game that doesn’t exist.
For a first attempt at a concept album, Purity Ring has gone all-in: the record has a thematic through line, a narrative, and a rich visual universe courtesy of fellow Canadian Mike Sunday. Sunday’s visuals depict Roddick and mj as avatars in an animated world, reminiscent of Nintendo 64 Zelda games or early iterations of Kingdom Hearts.
“After getting involved in the concept, I’m like, I get it. It really, really helps the creative process to have a direction,” Roddick says.
Final Fantasy looms as a heavy influence over Purity Ring — least of all for the gorgeous album art — and many of the album’s themes feel evocative of the series, which delves deep into grief, loss, conservation and renewal over its sixteen main-line games. And, like those games, Purity Ring takes its “hope and grief” from reality.
“It’s not an escapist fantasy or a desire for the past,” mj says. “It’s more about dreaming, and dreaming about building a better world and the possibility of that being a reality, and how we don’t have all the answers, but if we start building, we’ll find them.”
To build that world, Corin Roddick reimagined Purity Ring from the ground up. The record straddles the line between transformation and tradition, revamping the band’s canvas without discarding the core tenets.
“This record was more of a blank slate, throwing out any sort of blueprint we had from the past,” Roddick says. He details some of the changes under the hood: fast drum and bass double-time drums, a contrast to his usual slow hip-hop-style drums, and the flow-on effects from that.
“Just changing that affects all the production, because then everything has to fit with those rhythms in a different way. And that opened up this whole new experimental direction — different vocal effects, different types of melodies, different synths.”
The shake-up is evident all over the album, but there are certain points where Roddick’s production especially shines: mj’s melody on ‘memory ruins’ is commanding, but sparks fly from the track’s production. The album closer, ‘glacier: : in memory of rs: :’, is a touching tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto, an unpredictable, swelling arrangement.
However, the record’s highpoint is also the most un-Purity Ring the band has ever sounded. ‘imanocean’, one of many songs on the album that integrates classical guitar, comes in closest to a indie rock number, mj’s vocals carrying heft through its fleet-footed production. It marks the first Purity Ring record to use guitar.
“At least once a record Corin would try and I’d be like, no,” mj says. Roddick laughs with her, and admits he too was “very against” guitar when Purity Ring started out.
“We came from a background that was all guitar and all drums, we started the project almost more as a reaction in the opposite direction, trying to do things differently,” he says. “But you know, all musical rules are meant to be broken at one point or another — especially your own.”
Roddick and mj’s rebellion paid dividends. As Roddick puts it, the classical guitar “fits into electronic music in a strange way that feels a bit otherworldly.”
Creative risks like this form part of what may make Purity Ring a divisive record within the band’s dedicated fandom. A dive into their community on Reddit shows some mixed feelings over the new sound, which is perhaps to be expected whenever an established act pulls a left turn.
“Being Purity Ring for 15 years now, we’re both pretty comfortable with the way we see ourselves in terms of our sound and how we write, and the way that we make music on our own and together,” mj says. “Making this record made me a lot more excited to make more music in the future.”
“It’s cool that if people like it or they don’t like it,” Roddick adds. “I just hope they feel one way or another about it. It’s cool that people might feel different ways.”
Whether people love Purity Ring, grow to appreciate, or they never come around, the record is an unqualified success: Corin Roddick and mj are reinvigorated, excited, and finding new ways to express themselves. Having released their latest album independently, they’ve found the sort of freedom — creative and financial — that most artists dream about.