It’s not very often I get to see my love of rock music and my love of videogame music intersect in interesting ways. But almost every single time I do, one game can be found at the core—Final Fantasy 14.
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Part of that is certainly thanks to The Primals, the MMO’s official in-house rock band. It’s led by FF14 composer Masayoshi Soken, accompanied by localisation lead Michael-Christopher Koji Fox and non-developers Eikichi Iawi, Tetsuya Tachibana, and GUNN.
Sporting a raw sound with distorted, screeching guitars and high-energy vocals from Soken and Fox, The Primals manages to strike this incredibly interesting balance of being right in the heart of nerdom while also putting out the kind of music that wouldn’t sound amiss at your local rock show or festival.
It’s no surprise, then, that The Primals felt right at home at Download, the UK’s biggest rock and metal festival. It was the band’s first non-Fan Festival appearance outside of Asia, and despite a short timeslot it was an absolute corker. I had the opportunity to sit down with Soken, Fox, and GUNN the day after their high-octane set, and it immediately struck me just how jazzed all three seemed to be—even after a night to sleep off the post-performance high.
I thought part of that might have been the release of all the nerves building up to the main performance, but it turns out the band didn’t have much time for that. “[Download] took us around [the festival site] before we started, and the buggy that was supposed to take us back didn’t come,” Fox said.
“So we didn’t get back until like, 10 minutes before we were supposed to go to the stage. Normally you sit around and you get nervous because you’re thinking about it, but because all this was happening I didn’t have time to get nervous. And by the time you get on the stage, it’s like ‘go, go, go’. And of course, once you see people, you take all of that power and go.”
Scions and sinners
The Primals is rocking with a pretty decent discography at this point, but curating it to appeal to both fans and potential newcomers (some of whom may have never even played Final Fantasy 14) was important when it came to putting together the five-song setlist.
“Not everyone knew [Final Fantasy] 14, so we approached it from that perspective,” Soken told me. “We wanted to make the most of the time we had, so we knew that we couldn’t just rely on the songs that get a really good reaction at Fan Fest.” Making sure The Primals could show their musical talent to “get everyone on board and make sure they’re having a good time” led to a tight selection of some of the band’s biggest, most energetic tracks. A choice which, as Fox tells me, actually proved a challenge in execution.
“[The Primals concerts] have the ups and the downs—you have the heavy songs, then you go into the slower songs, more electronic stuff. This time we focused on the heavy, on the power, on the ‘go, go, go,’ and our drummer was probably this close to dying,” he said. “Even though it was 25 minutes—our shortest set ever—I think that’s the most tired we’ve been after a set because it was just ‘go, go, go, go, go’ all the way to the end, 100% of the way.”
Soken leaned forward, telling me: “Shouting. I just shouted the whole time.”
Fox joked about the exhaustion he felt by the time the band’s final track, Under the Weight, came around. “I was like, am I gonna pass out on stage? But if I pass out on stage, that’d be pretty fucking cool. I was like, I wanted some oxygen!”
While my favourite moment was hearing Absolute Tyranny—one of the game’s more recent tracks from this January’s last batch of Arcadion raids—the two tracks Not Afraid and Under the Weight were perhaps the most fitting energy for Download Festival, and the ones that The Primals plucked out as the one that had the biggest chance of reeling in new listeners.
A sound reborn
Seeing a videogame band giving it their all on a stage surrounded by tens of thousands of rock fans sprawled across half a dozen stages really drove home just how much closer the two worlds have become over the years, something which the band wholeheartedly agrees with.
“10, 15 years ago, when we were starting out with this kind of thing, there was game music and there was rock music. And there was a divide in between the two,” GUNN said. “But in the past few years, I really feel like they’ve come a lot closer together, and in fact, sort of within that same bubble now.”
But as Koji points out, videogame music has always banged—the technology just wasn’t always there to fully realise it. “You look back at the music in games 20 years ago and go ‘Oh, that’s game music,’ but it’s only because that’s how it was sold. You go back and listen to some of those soundtracks from Mega Man. They hit hard. You’ve got some rocking beats, bass lines that are just crazy.
“But it was because the technology limited it, so you got the bleeps and the bloops, and it was ‘Oh, that’s just game music’. But you go back and listen to that now and you’re like, ‘Oh, I see what they were trying to do. If only they had the technology they have now.'”
Now that The Primals has tackled one of the UK’s biggest festivals, what’s next for them? First of all, a new album, Soken tells me—which should be plush with rearrangements of music from Dawntrail’s stellar Arcadion raid series.
But doing this also seems to have given the band the desire to take their music all over the world. “We’ve never had any opportunity to go and meet our fans in Australia. I want to make contact with The Primals fans in areas and regions where we haven’t been able to get in touch with yet. So the next goal: Primals world tour.”
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