Cuepoint: You’ve said that this album was heavily influenced by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

Porter Robinson: Songs like “Sad Machine” and “Hear The Bells,” they all use what are known as soundfonts, which are essentially these low quality emulations of real instruments of harps, flutes, pianos, strings and things that don’t sound realistic. But they don’t sound 8-Bit either, like the NES, they specifically to me, dead-on like Nintendo 64 music. And I used that type of instrumentation constantly throughout the album. Like the second break of ‘Sad Machine” is all soundfonts. A lot of them are almost like emulations of the Ocarina of Time music and that’s something that for a lot of people that were kind of present for that era of video game history picked up on immediately. If you look at the end of “Sad Machine” or the end of my remix of [Nero’s] “The Thrill” or the end of “Hear The Bells,” you see people commenting on Soundcloud like “Zelda! Zelda! Zelda!” so it’s definitely not just me. But yeah, that’s where that comes from.

What traditional musicians outside of electronic music would you say influenced the songwriting?

I think that my biggest influences are electronic acts. Daft Punk is probably my number 1, then Kanye West would be number 2 after that. I think I was just every bit as inspired by Dance Dance Revolution music, which was the reason why I started writing when I was 12. The soundtrack to DDR was the first electronic music that I’d ever heard, which was a Japanese rhythm video game. Then stuff like scoring for animations and movies soundtracks and stuff like that.

On the album’s first track, “Divinity,” there’s that distorted sound that works as the main instrument, is that a vocal sample of Amy Millan?

Yeah, it’s actually not hers. It’s like a boys choir type sound that I was messing with and that whole instrumental actually existed before Amy was on the track. But it’s nice because her vocal candor is pretty similar to the sample that I was chopping there.

Was there any particular reason why you chose to start the album with that song?

I started the album with that song because it was the first one that I wrote that I felt was in the style of Worlds. It was the first one that had the 90 BPM, side-chained chords, sort of slowed-down but still four-on-the-floor and more emotional quality that starts the hook, which I’d say it was a big part of the sonic quality of Worlds. That was the first song that I wrote like that. And I also love albums that start off with like a strong riff.

On “Sad Machine”, I understand you took a really techy / geeky approach to making this record, the vocals actually being by an A.I. of some kind.

Yeah, I used a program called Vocaloid. It’s sort of like Siri. Like a text to speech software, except that you can assign notes to each syllable.

If you’ve ever used text-to-speech software where you typed in words and then it says it back to you, it’s the same idea applied to singing. So I would write a lyric and I would write a melody and assign each syllable to a note. It comes with its own software for doing specifically that. I just thought the notion of a human and robot duet was something that was really beautiful and touching to me. And that vibe really evoked the whole feeling of fantasy and fiction and escapism that I wanted to album to have. So that’s why I decided to work with vocaloid. And there’s three songs on the album that use it. “Fresh Static Snow,” the vocal there is like a robot voice and “Goodbye to a World” is the same technique. Just because it’s all very sci-fi to me and very imaginary in a way that was appealing.

And what would you say this song is about, apologies or regrets? “We’ll never speak of this again,” you sing…

Almost every single song on Worlds is supposed to evoke the feeling of stories. I’m often asked if there is an actual literal story that I’m describing. There’s not, it’s just supposed allude or give the feeling of a narrative that doesn’t really exist or isn’t real. I think that the lyrics of “Sad Machine” are mostly just composed of phrases that I felt were kind of poetic and nice and sang well, but also give that sort of fiction, escapism kind of vibe. Like “She depends on you,” I was so happy when I stumbled upon that lyric. Like, that’s so nice, something about it pulls out all of the feelings that I want to pull out. It’s not about anyone in my life or anything like that, it’s just my approach to music.

“Years of War,” this track has a very 1980s, reverby feel to it. Is that what you were going for?

Yeah, I think I was trying to do a cutesy synth-pop thing. Honestly, I just resent that song. I worked so hard on it and the longer I get away from the album, the less I like it. I have stopped playing it in my shows. I don’t know, it turned out cool. And all respects to all of my collaborators on that song — they did great, they were troopers — but just something about it. I think I worked a little too hard on it. It was just the hardest I ever worked on a song. It just kind of reminds me of frustration. I feel that some of the joy and triumphant feelings of that song don’t feel authentic to me when I listen to it, because it reminds me of so much frustration. So I don’t really play that song any more.

On “Flicker” you have this Japanese vocal sample that you are kind of stuttering? What exactly is she saying here?

Yeah, she is saying “Watashi wa choudo nani ga juuyou ka mitsukeyou toshite iru,” I think. The way that that vocal came out, was that I was making a song as joke. A lot of my favorite songs kind of started that way. I was just messing around with a soul sample, which is what you hear in the background. I was like, “how funny would it be to just have a high pitched silly rap over this?” So I took this text document that I had of several song title ideas that I had written down on my phone, and just translated them to Japanese and I decided I would cut them together and make that the rapping on the song. What it says, is “I’m just trying to find what is important to me,” which is nice, because it could have come out as something completely random. But I got really hooked on the sound of it. I liked the way it sounded, I liked the rhythm of it, the cadence and the flow, so I decided to keep it. But yeah, that song is kind of a frankensong. It’s one of my prouder moments on the album because it goes so many places, but flows naturally in between them. It has, I think, a great climax, a very powerful and big moment.