Gener8ion – Love & Tears

An eerie buzzing gives way to twinkling, like a horde of threatening flies in a garden of wind chimes. 070 Shake opens the album with God Hates Space, using the soft rasp of her voice to the almost-romantic, nostalgic song’s advantage. Being the opener, the song establishes listeners’ sense of confused expectation and time. Though the singer gently cares for her lover (in the exhibition, the “lover” is actually her devotion to the Hollow Earth Movement), she still waits for an answer to the existential question of where we go after death and who waits there for us. “Nobody knows,” but “They say there are signs / Everyone’s waiting for them.” Regardless of doubt, the singer claims her love is eternal: “My love has no past, and it has no time.”

The irony lies in the fact that, based on the song’s title, the Hollow Earth Movement seems to be an offshoot of the Flat Earth Society, a uniquely contemporary anti-science movement. The singer has established this unfounded belief as her idol, and her desire for answers grows more fervent with an orchestral reverb added to her voice about two-thirds of the way through. Despite her blind devotion, her concern can’t be squashed. “Where do we go?” she wonders. The question can be understood in two ways: where does one go after death, but also, where can one put their faith after being drawn into the fanatically false world of alt-right movements?

Quick, video-game-style beats throw us into Heart of Blue. The production is a synthified version of 2000s techno-electronica – think: Christina Aguilera’s Keeps Getting Better. The punchy reverb matches the pounding of a quick heartbeat only to get subsumed into a poppy, Elton John-style keyboard melody. The lyrics are simple: Surkin directs someone to take his soul, dreams, clothes, feelings, time, screams, gains, and tears. He exaggerates 070 Shake’s devotion in a dizzying musical metronome. His voice cuts out but eventually returns as a whisper in the background, “Only you [...] / Heart of blue.” The relative lyrical emptiness becomes literal when Storm II begins with “Like an empty fire.” Heart of Blue is the bubbling and building of fanaticism, which is only affirmed by the story of Storm.

Though Storm II is earlier on the tracklist than Storm I, the Storm video combines them with Yung Lean acting as a school bully in a Leeds public school in 2034. The rapper walks into a room of motionless teenage boys who only begin to stir with his presence. The video is an exaggerated vignette of teenage boyhood. They smoke 6G to get high in a commentary on panic around technological adaptation (the 5G tower conspiracies). They draw dicks on school property and make out with anatomy dummies. But perhaps most important to note is the group dynamic. In the hyper-gendered masculine space, the school acts as a kind of literal manosphere. Yung Lean is their leader, and though he revels in the violence he inflicts and encourages, he is also a victim of it.

In one striking moment, he sits alone in a bed of tall grass, leaning further back and looking off into the sky. The moment is as sombre as it is peaceful, with the echo of the lyrics “Just go ahead and run / If you won’t die for some” playing in the background. The performance of hyper-masculinity continues immediately after. Though Yung Lean’s costuming visually sets him apart from the group, for the first time, the consequences of this leader persona are turned inward. This homosocial world of violence is not just “how things are,” but something that leaves the figure isolated, from himself and from others. Is this what causes the lyrical “death wish” that Yung Lean sings of?

In another moment, Yung Lean’s character and his “goons” are standing on the outside edge of a balcony. They let go to see how many times they can clap before grabbing back onto the railing. Yung Lean is obviously terrified, closing his eyes, leaning over the railing as close as he can, and the camera trails in a vertigo that swaps from his face to the people watching him and back. But he smiles and holds the shoulder of his sidekick when, in an attempt to impress Yung Lean, the sidekick achieves the same number of claps. Though the Swedish artist realises the inherent violence of the game (and masculinist dogma), he still engages and consequently encourages it. This toxic relationship is what creates the bond that allows the young men to “stand together through the storm.” They are all so deeply invested in this world that when they attempt to reach one another to “Take the darkness out [their hearts],” it doesn’t work and they are left in a hypnotic, swirling dance – at one point, the choreography even mimics the wiping of tears, flicking them out towards the audience, a visual representation of the societal pressure for men to be apathetic. Like the tongue-in-cheek drug of 6G, this masculinist relationality “feels like a drug” but still doesn’t “Give you no love.” It leaves everyone (men included) “all out of luck,” but men still feign the privilege of not “[giving] a fuck.”

Yannis Philippakis features on Love & Tears, which begins with the snap and bass of a 1950s song before adding a bright twinkling and transitioning into a 2010s electro-pop beat. This transition between a more electric, happy sound and a brooding one mirrors Charlize Theron’s masterful facial acting in the video. Though the video was filmed in 2018, in the contemporary AI bubble, it takes on a more significant meaning. In 2034 Mumbai, a giant machine is able to scan and reproduce the expressions of actors. Though the machine’s power is not exactly obvious, since we are not given the process of this scan/reproduction – only a trailing shot of the machine and then Theron – the falsetto vocals tell the story of someone watching a beloved figure fall.

The story mirrors a biblical one: God watching Adam fall to earth and lamenting what could have been. In an AI-related read, the allusion has us ponder what it means to be human when matters of human nature (like emotions, art, and interpersonal connection) can be so carelessly recreated. Are we God or Adam, lamenting or falling? It also posits generative AI as a kind of idol – the knower of all answers, the creator of all things. Nietzsche once declared that “God is dead” in a contemplation on how the Enlightenment and secularisation changed Western Christian society, but we constantly see the figure of God being recreated. Love & Tears, an appropriate album title, asks us how this new idol shapes our lives. Do we treat this artificial God without scrutiny, certain that it has come to save us? Or is it simply one more ingredient in the recipe of inevitable human destruction?

Seeburg is a three-minute instrumental/synth track. It is heavily produced, buzzy, and futuristic. In the background, there are distant shouts, voices, and laughter. The title quite literally tells us to look (Seeburg), to follow the song’s trajectory. The simpler drum beat turns into an almost-alien siren sound with a spooky overtone, emphasising the final, mysterious shift to silence and setting up the bright piano of Neo Surf Prélude. In Neo Surf Prélude, a child soliloquies about flying, the peace of loneliness, and the inevitable and disappointing need “to come back down in the fucking world.” The young voice juxtaposes the surprisingly stark and melancholy speech, forcing listeners to confront the state of the world, sociopolitically and environmentally. What is the legacy we are leaving behind?

Neo Surf begins with a clicky Otamatone beat and the return of 070 Shake in the environmental and urban decay of 2034 Athens, one where birds fly alongside drones delivering Amazon-style packages of weapons. Despite the ugliness of the world, the characters are hopeful, reflecting Gener8ion’s belief that even in the end times, kids will always just be kids. The lyrics build on the religious allusion in previous songs with lyrics that collapse the concept of going to Heaven and being seen by others, being appropriately prepared for performance. The song balances obsessions about perception with self-isolation (“They don’t wanna see me flex / They just want me ‘cause I’m next [...] / I’ll be gone for the night / Searching for this feeling”). Like Love & Tears establishes the idolatry of AI, Neo Surf arguably establishes ego and the way we are perceived by others as the new moral hierarchy, the grounds for what we manufacture our behaviour around.

The creators’ intention and the lyrics do, however, feel incongruous. They reveal an adult perception of social media and a lack of privacy as less serious than it is. While it is certainly true that kids will always be kids, the dystopian futuristic setting is more aesthetic than it is honest. Even river pollution is framed beautifully: three figures surfing along the majesty of a gorge and dumping bright green waste as they glide seamlessly. On Try, Adèle Castillon captures this incongruity with her tinkly voice. The lyrics are both resentful (“The thought of you is disturbing”) and conciliatory (“Writing your name / Just in case I would forget / Au cas où tu retournerais”). Things may seem happy and bright on the surface of the Rebecca Sugar-esque production, but there is something swelling and uncertain lurking below.

Glacier Rose evokes the image of a beautiful flower emerging from the unprecedented melting of glaciers caused by global warming. The instrumental track is almost as much guitar plucking and horns blowing as it is the ambient sound of air whispering, sirens sounding, and birds singing. It begins angelic, but grows in intensity, becoming more pumping and inspiring as it continues, almost like something from a spy movie. By the end, this builds to a mysterious, eerie flatlining of sound. Like the title suggests, the song reflects a beauty that grows from something ugly. But this beauty cannot be taken at face value. It is a warning sign: things have gone so wrong that flowers bloom even where they naturally should not.

Love & Tears by the artistic duo Gener8ion is immensely conceptually ambitious – perhaps to a fault. Though it is supplemented by a fascinating visual component, the songs feel too lyrically empty to really make the connections between patriarchy, capitalism, and environmental destruction that the pair seem to be trying to make. At its weakest, its commentary feels as though it must be scraped from the strained relationship between too few music videos and lacklustre lyricism. In fact, the duo has sometimes explicitly stated what songs and their accompanying videos are about in interviews (like kids being kids in Neo Surf and the confusing technology of Theron’s cameo). This overt authorial intent feels somewhat antithetical to the nature of music culture, where music is largely “owned” and interpreted by its listeners. The songs, however, are sonically gorgeous, especially 2034, which is a sound somewhere between the violin pop of Bridgerton and Foster the People. “Get ready!” a voice exclaims, pulling listeners into the song. Halfway through, the music becomes bumpier and a discordant note plays in the background, increasing tension until the song’s end. In it, you feel the mix of hope and dread that comes from looking towards the future.

However, even the best songs do not feel strong enough for the work to stand alone as a concept album, a weakness compounded by conflicted album sequencing. While Storm is a complete work in its film, being split in two and separated on the album makes it feel interrupted and underdeveloped. Pushing Storm I to directly after Storm II instead would have allowed for Try to immediately follow 2034, pushing the album on a steady trajectory towards a timid, even menacing hope. Unfortunately, the visual companions available publicly (available on YouTube and not only in the exhibition Visions of 2034) fall so strikingly towards the aesthetic and esoteric that they can distract from the album’s entire concept. Perhaps the strength of Love & Tears lies in its ability to make us question our own views on art and the world that leads to its creation. If the future is tumultuous, then naturally, so too would be an album that so heavily centres around it.