For our Track by Track feature, artists open up about the stories behind each song on their latest album. Today, COIN takes us through their futuristic new album, Uncanny Valley.
If the members of COIN want listeners to take anything away from the album, it’s this: “We’re all just learning and loving.”
It’s a tender and very human response to an album inspired by and heavily incorporating artificial intelligence, technology, futurism, and their collective effect on interpersonal relationships. Uncanny Valley, available today (March 25th), is the latest from the Nashville-based trio. It’s an immersive and imaginative album that uses this fascination with the positives and negatives of technology (both sides of the coin, if you will) as a lens for exploring human life.
COIN member Chase Lawrence has broken down the album in our latest Track By Track interview. “I am so excited for this album to just exist,” he shares. “I can’t describe how these songs have been there for me over the past two years, and I am so excited to see if they do the same for anyone else.”
Stream Uncanny Valley and read the commentary in full below; you can also catch the band on tour.
“Learning”:
“Learning” was actually the first song we wrote for the album. I had no idea what we were making at the time, but I knew it was the start of something. We had watched a documentary called AlphaGo the night before. It’s about an AI who plays an acutely human board game called Go. The engineers created an “algorithm for intuition,” and that idea sent my head spinning for months.
“Chapstick”:
“Chapstick” was the second song we wrote for the album. You know when you feed computers hundreds of hours of Law & Order scripts and then task them with making a new script? Our philosophy was similar. We fed our brains the parameters of Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” and Gorillaz’s “Feel Good Inc.” and basically said — compute. Classic rock instrumentation vs. high fidelity vs. out of tune vs. empty my head lyrics. We came out with something so strange and beautiful.
