Today, Body Meat, the alias of Chris Taylor, announces his debut album ‘Starchris’ due 23rd August via Partisan Records.

‘Starchris’ doesn’t simply deconstruct pop music’s conventions – it shatters them – scattering musical fragments of chaos, complexity, and pop infectiousness across the album’s 13 songs. Partly influenced by the intricate world building potential and storytelling of role playing video games, the album follows a transformative hero’s journey from start to finish, charting a rough trajectory through cut-scene-like moments and bosses of various difficulty levels, leading toward an ultimate moment of self-realisation and peace.

‘Starchris’ refines the distinctive musical language that Taylor spent years building, sanding the edges of IDM, club music, experimental pop, trap, footwork, and metal to soften them into something remarkably warm and welcoming, finding catharsis amongst chaos. Alongside the announcement, he shares new single “High Beams,” the album’s trap-inflected first-level boss fight colliding pop melodies with waves of nu-metal.

Speaking on the track, Body Meat shares:

“‘High Beams’ is about a programmer anxiously creating a game from within a cave. He codes all of the functionality, the rules, and physics, every parameter to his liking. He then tries to instantiate himself into this world as a copy. But an oversight within his sloppy code work creates a bug within it. His instantiated copy is unable to be removed and begins hunting him. The programmer, terrified, tries to destroy the copy of himself. Nothing he does can stop the copy from moving towards him. He starts to realize he has done this before. The copy remembers him, and knows that he has to warn the programmer. The programmer is cursed to write this code over and over again. Only the bugged copy can break the cycle.”

The release of “High Beams” follows Body Meat’s recent performances at SXSW, including Stereogum’s official showcase and his inaugural Body Meat Lost Odyssey club night in NYC, featuring DJ sets from Taylor and friends.

Since creating the moniker in 2016, Taylor’s releases as Body Meat have functioned like distinct musical sandboxes with different dimensions and house rules established for each one. Taking inspiration from early stints in Denver art-rock bands, Taylor’s music as Body Meat is rooted in piecing together the debris in the aftermath of unpredictable genre clashes and making sense of them. His singular blend of trap production and Ethiopian / funk music on his two previously released EPs Truck Music (2019) and Year of the Orc (2021) existed in a plane all of their own, with Pitchfork describing the latter as “chaotic, overwhelming stuff, which is part of the point.”

Pre-save/order ‘Starchris’, listen to “High Beams” above, and stay tuned for more from Body Meat coming soon. 

1. A Tone in The Dark

2. The Mad Hatter

3. High Beams

4. Electrische

5. Focus 

6. Right Here

7. Crystalize

8. North Side

9. Starchris

10. Im In Pieces

11. Demons

12. Õbu No Seirei (Spirit of an Orb)

13. Paradise