Track By Tracks: Lords Of The Trident - V.G.E.P. (2024)

1. To Kill a God:

This is about Final Fantasy 6, my (and the Baron’s) favorite video game of all time. We like this game so much, this is not the first Lords of the Trident song to feature references to that game! When creating the music video for this song, we did something no one has ever done before - run over 100,000v of lightning through our drummer for five minutes straight during filming! As far as we’re aware, no one’s ever done this successfully before (and lived).

2. Master of Speed:

This originally started out as a demo for The Offering, but was deemed “too happy”. The Baron wrote this about his carefree days of childhood summer, but I thought the frenetic speed of the riffs fit really well into a song about one of the coolest racing games out there, F-Zero!

3. Jet Set City:

This song has a bit more of that 80s personality to it, so it’s no surprise that Aki wrote a lot of the original ideas for this one. That sort of in-your-face attitude that the music exudes was perfect for a song about spitting in the face of the man and making your mark on the city using whatever means necessary. A perfect corollary for the game Jet Grind Radio!

4. Valerie:

While not a video game song per se, this Steve Winwood cover gives off the vibe of walking through your local mall in the early 90s, music blaring through the tinny speakers on the ceiling of the mall, on your way to the local arcade. I recall always hearing this song outside of my local Aladdin’s Castle arcade, and it’s a favorite of mine and Aki’s.

5. The Ballad of Jon Milwaukee:

We have a local hard rock radio station that - for some reason or another - doesn’t really like to play our music very much. The Baron decided he was going to write a song SO PERFECT for that station - so oozing with “modern rock radio” - that they’d HAVE to play it. He accidentally ended up making one of the most complex songs we’ve ever written! I was playing the game Road Rash on our regular Monday night Twitch stream at the time, and one of the racers was named “Jon Milwaukee”, so of COURSE we had to pick him (Milwaukee is a city in Wisconsin and very close to us). I wrote the lyrics based on fake “lore” that the chat came up with while we were playing!