Your band has been talking about a record with this specific title for years. How did you decide on the name?

PETER BERKMAN: The title was originally a kind of like part-YOLO feeling, part daring ourselves to do something that was really chasing reality as opposed to Endless Fantasy.

We had spent years looking at video games and our relationship with Japanese culture, but we passed over the other side of a line, where we were like, "Let's take a look at who we are." Turn it inward instead of outward. That title, its meaning has changed and will continue to change, but we do not know the direction that change is in. All that we know is that we're happy with it.

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What did you find as you began to look inward?



BERKMAN: Questions of "How did we get these habits? How did we get these interests? How did we arrive at being chiptune musicians, really?" The album began in a process of chiptune-as-identity crisis, but that's not really where it ended.

I think a big part of what we found is the impact that digital music had on shaping our sensibilities as a band. You always hear electronic music thrown around, but chiptune is decidedly not electronic music. Everything is totally programmed. So to bring that back to [USA], for me creatively, much of it comes from taking chiptune to mean not just the chips that are in Nintendo consoles, but chips that are in Intel processors and stuff.

[We] rediscovered technology that was already there. Instead of having five sound banks of a 2A03 sound chip, we have sample libraries and stuff.

ARY WARNAAR: I think a potential read that I don't think would be correct is: "Is there a correlation between the darker tones occasionally on the album and it being called [USA]?” We wanted to create a whole-sounding album — it covers a wider range of feelings and ideas and concepts. It's definitely not a dark album by any means, but it's a more complete-sounding album.

If we were all from Canada, the album would be called [Canada], or if we were all from the UK, it would be called [UK]. It's not about the United States. It's about being from somewhere and having like a label attached to you, your personal relationship to it, and your personal relationship with any assumption. We could've called the album [Chiptune], because it's a genre that's always attached to us from the beginning.

BERKMAN: The big part about looking inward was considering the impact of being raised by video games had on us. Video games really dominated our lives and our audience's lives and have such a huge part of our culture. There's the question of, "Are video games poisoning children's minds, are they an escape that we need, or are they this super harmful thing?" It can't be either of those things. It's both of those things. The only way that you can see their effects on you is by stepping outside of it — that's what we really tried to do on this album.

