Purity Ring Find A New Sound in an Imagined Realm on Fourth Album On their fourth studio album, Canadian electronic-pop duo Purity Ring found their most authentic selves and sound through the prism of an imagined RPG video game. Their forthcoming self-titled LP, arriving thirteen years after their critically acclaimed debut Shrines on September 26th via their own The Fellowship label, hears vocalist and lyricist Megan James (mj) and multi- instrumentalist and producer Corin Roddick confidently stride into what they have described as a “bold new chapter”, where they embrace softer and more contained meditations in which they astutely and artfully address their dissatisfaction with the state of the world and create their own fantasy realm.

Heralding the vocal stylings and ethereal layering of early Grimes and FKA Twigs, which are masterfully countered with PC Music-adjacent production, Purity Ring is undeniably the band’s most accomplished artistic statement to date. Part of its magic and allure, which draws you deeper into their expansive arrangements, is how seamlessly they tie digital and organic timbres together to make a multi-faceted (yet entirely cohesive) body of work. Richly textured with a cloak of many tones from frosty maudlin synth patches, stunning piano melodies, sweet acoustic guitar licks and propulsive beats, floating atop the conscientiously layered arrangements are different versions of mj guiding listeners through these irresistible dreamscapes. Employing a number of
different vocal manipulations throughout the songs, going from a sweet vulnerability in her typical cadence to siren-like calls with soaring, pitched-up manipulations transforming her into an otherworldly presence.

Northern Transmissions caught up with mj and Corin ahead of Purity Ring’s release to discuss entering a new era of their creative partnership, completing an arc with their first three records and what video game characters they’d be for a day.

Northern Transmissions: I was interested to read that your self-titled forthcoming fourth album is a concept album that you describe as being one “that serves as the soundtrack to an imagined RPG. Inspired by games like Nier Automata and Final Fantasy X, the record tells the story of two hapless characters —embodiments of mj and Corin — on a journey to build a kinder world amid the ruins of a broken one.” How early in the album’s development did you come up with that concept?

Megan James: It was pretty early on in the process of writing the album. We spent a week up in the mountains writing and came back with four or five songs. A few months later, after some of the things we’d done there came together, we had another period where we were working on the record. It was about half done, and it was making sense in terms of the things we’re both influenced by, care about and have an affinity with. It made a lot of sense to start writing the record in that framework. It also helped us further all the decisions we were making about the songs because we had a focus point.

In the past, I always thought that bands, like we used to, would come up with a concept after making the record because you make music because it’s what we do, and then afterwards, you’re like, ‘OK, what is the story? What’s the concept? How do we talk about this?’ This time around, I was like, ‘Oh, maybe people actually are coming up with concepts before they start,’ because it made the process make sense for us in a way that we hadn’t really incorporated before. It was an interesting way to work and really propelling.

NT: I enjoyed listening to this album on repeat. Not only for all of the incredible sonic and melodic components, but I was drawn to your lyrics, Megan. Did having an overarching concept, and within that a character-version of yourself, along with the different vocal effects applie throughout the album, help create some distance and therefore facilitate you being able to unlock certain emotions and experiences in your writing?

Megan James: Thank you for noticing that. I appreciate that. Other things actually have been more unlocking for me, in a way. In relation to the last question, the various voice manipulations were, and

Corin, correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the reasons we were like, ‘Hey, this could be a video game soundtrack and these could be characters,’ was that it really lent itself to the concept. Also, I’m at a stage in my life and in our career as musicians, where I see myself as a writer before anything else. I’m just like, ‘Fuck it. This is what I do, so I’m going to do it!’ I’m less wary of what I’m doing. I’m confident and comfortable, so that’s also where the writing went. I wanted this writing to feel ambiguous and not just getting from A to B with a point, but creating, word-to-word, a journey that has emotion, and it’s more like forking paths in a garden.

NT: Corin, in terms of your process of creating the album’s sonic worlds, Megan’s lyrics are so vivid, down to how she frequently incorporates color in her songwriting. How do her lyrics, and all of the details in them, influence the tones and textures you choose to bring into songs to complement the spaces she’s creating?

Corin Roddick: It’s an interesting question because I’m really not a lyrics person. A lot of people collaborating will focus on the lyrics and try to bring the meaning of the lyrics out in the instrumentation. However, that has never been part of my process. For me, it’s more about the way that the lyrics sound in a phonetic sense and how they carry the melody. That gives me a feeling that I then try to match with the music. Even outside of Purity Ring, with all of my favorite songs from other artists, I couldn’t tell you the lyrics to my favorite songs because they just wash over me as a mouth sound that carries a melody.

Megan James: For Purity Ring, and this is one of the reasons we work so well together, the lyrics for Corin are all about how they sound. That’s part of writing melodies and lyrics, too; it’s making them sound musical and fitting regardless of the words, even though words can sometimes really matter. But yeah, it’s more so that the phonetics are a big part of Corin’s approach. I really believe that’s why we work so well, I think Corin’s had suggestions about lyrics maybe once!

Corin Roddick: Yeah, if I ever asked a question about a lyric, it’s only ever, ‘Oh, can we change those syllables so that it carries this part of it?’ Or, ‘We can put this extra note in the melody or get rid of this syllable to have a note missing so it’s more mechanical’. In a broader sense, on this album, you mentioned different vocal effects, and I think that was something that we hit on in the first one or two demos that we started making for this album. We stumbled upon this vocoder effect in the opening track, “Relict”, which was maybe the first or second track that we did for the album, and it was perfect because we’re like, ‘Oh, this sounds like an album opener. We’ll stick with it!’ Stumbling upon that vocal effect recontextualized how I could process her vocals. It opened some doors on other songs to have lyrics presented in a way that we haven’t before, especially on “Red The Sunrise”, and the more spoken word elements. It made it part of the music and a different texture or a different character, or almost like there was another vocalist in the band through this effect. It definitely helped us realize that we
wanted to make this be part of a bigger picture with the concept album and the RPG style.

NT: Another element to this album that I enjoyed was how successfully you meld big immersive electronic and digital textures with really pretty and intimate organic instrumentation. You do this with the different levels of effects applied to Megan’s vocals, too. One song, in particular, that I always loved coming back to was “MJ Odyssey”. Megan, you’re classically trained in piano, so this song makes sense for you to include on this album and also presents a really cool tonal contrast.How soon into developing the sound of the album did you decide to combine those different sonic worlds?

Corin Roddick: That was a piano piece mj wrote back in pre-Womb-era.

Megan James: Yeah, I think I showed it to you when we first started that record.

Corin Roddick: Yeah, maybe in 2017, around then. It was one of those things that immediately became one of my favorite things I’ve ever heard her make. We had a recording of it, but it didn’t fit on Womb. It just didn’t make sense with the whole theme and the sound of that record. It was something that we put on the shelf and said, ‘One day this will make sense. ’ As we got further into the process of this new album, that track came back into my mind, and I listened to it in the context of the rest of the songs and I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect. This really has the feeling of the record,’ and it filled a missing section that we didn’t have yet in the story. It was a freebie, a hidden gem that we were able to make the album make more sense. I was like, ‘We already have the missing piece. This is great!’

Megan James: This music is very fine-tuned and electronic; this record has a lot of digital elements to it, but I think in one way or another, a major part of our sound has always been the intimacy of it. We were in a studio with a grand piano last summer, and we were like, ‘Hey, let’s record that song so that we can have a reprieve,’ in terms of the arc of the record. It ended up being very important for the sequencing.

Corin Roddick: It’s the contrast that it has with the rest of the record that makes it work. I would say the same about “Iamanocean”, as well, with its acoustic guitar and live drum feel; those two tracks are like portals into a different reflection of the rest of the sound on the record.

NT: I always find it fascinating when an artist or band decide to self-title an album a few releases into their discography. Why did this album feel like the time to do that? Did you feel that you’d reached a sound that you’d been striving towards throughout your career?

Megan James: In a way, absolutely. After all these years, this is what we’re doing, and it feels very comfortable and right. In the past, with naming a record, it often came pretty easily and felt right one way or another. With this one, for a few reasons, it’s less contained as a record; it’s more vast than our other ones have been, and it also feels entirely new for us to be doing something like this. We said in the press release for the album that we’re in a new era. Along with that, the only thing that really made sense and felt right was to self-titled this album. I don’t even know if we tried to come up with other titles, did we?

Corin Roddick: I don’t think so. There were no other candidates! It really cemented when the visual artist that we’re working with, Mike Sunday, sent us a mock-up of what became the final cover. Seeing Purity Ring written alongside the artwork just felt right. From my perspective, the first three albums have a lot in common with each other, especially from a production standpoint. It’s like an arc of seeing a sound through from beginning to end that evolved over the course of those three albums. On our third album, Womb, I don’t know if we could go further with that; it felt like the end of an arc. Now it feels like we’re restarting from a blank page and incorporating a lot of new styles and elements and textures and tempos that we never explored on our first three albums. I think it’s just that feeling of it being like a fresh start after completing that arc. It made sense to embrace the self-titled thing.

NT: Since your second album, Another Eternity, in 2015, there have been 5-year gaps between releases. That’s a solid period of time for you to go through various experiences and continue to evolve as a person and discover new things that you want to experiment with or explore in your music. Outside of that, we also see how quickly things around the world can change. In between Womb and your latest LP, the world has changed so much, for the worse in most cases. Does making music now mean something different to you at this point in your career, whether it’s putting something out for audiences to escape everything with or to create something meaningful to you?

Corin Roddick: Yeah, definitely. This album felt way more enjoyable for me to make than our previous two albums. It just felt very effortless, we had momentum, and it was just fun in a way that maybe it hadn’t been as directly since the very early days of working on our first album. I’m not sure why that was. It’s a combination of so many factors: getting older and not caring what people think as much, the world changing around us, and all of these things. Something clicked together, and for me at least, I was like, ‘Oh, we’re cooking now! This feels right.’

Megan James: Yeah, we’re just older and more content in calling ourselves musicians, and our careers are what we do. It all feels a lot more comfortable. For me, making any art now, after what everyone has been through, and given that what we’re going through isn’t over, there’s an ongoing pandemic, genocide, harm to people we need in this world. For me, making art in any form or capacity at this stage in my life is about making something beautiful because we deserve joy even when everything feels shit. Joy is valid. Also, I feel like it’s accepting where we are, but also in conjunction with dreaming about where we could be and having conversations, writing and talking about what it would take to have material change and have material care and do things that we can to make life better for a lot of people. Sure, a record isn’t going to necessarily do that, but sometimes a song can change someone’s life. That’s not necessarily what I’m aiming to do with writing or art these days, but my recognition of what the world looks like now is 100% part of my art and what we’ve all been through in the last five years. In that sense, I don’t see it as an escape; it’s dreaming more than escape.

NT: Finally, if you could be a video game character for one day – and explore the world of their game and have all their powers, who would you be and why?

Megan James: In different phases of my life, I’d choose something different, but right now I would probably choose to be in Secret of Mana. Or, even years after playing Tears of the Kingdom or Breath of the Wild, I would want to be there all the time

Corin Roddick: You want to be Link?

Megan James: Well, obviously.

Corin Roddick: You could even just be a korok, that would be amazing. I would just be hiding under a rock waiting to be found. Maybe I’d be Kirby, but I don’t really want to eat people to take their power. I like the concept of it, but I wouldn’t do that.

Pre-order by Purity Ring HERE