I want a PlayStation 5. I have tried on multiple occasions to acquire a PlayStation 5. I do not have a PlayStation 5. At the rate things are going, these words will likely be the first in my autobiography and on my tombstone—and perhaps yours as well. It is only right, then, that somebody has decided to immortalize our current, dire moment in song. It is only righter that the somebody in question is Claudio Sanchez, frontman of sci-fi-flavored progressive rock band Coheed and Cambria.
As part of a recent Twitch stream, Sanchez—who does have a PlayStation 5, somehow—unveiled his latest tune, which was born of the PS5 menu’s background music.
“I spent most of the day working on music, so when I turned on the PS5, this music was screaming for me to play to it,” Sanchez said during the stream. “So I put together a little something 10 minutes before [going live]—not even 10 minutes before. So I’m gonna play you a song with my new jam partner, the PS5.”
Then he picked up his acoustic guitar. Here is what he came up with:
The song is haunting and mournful. It slaps, but with an air of wistful heartbreak about it—as though it is slapping at a funeral. The lyrics, of which there are only a few, nevertheless hit home: “There’s no more left of you (x3) / In stock / PlayStation (x2) / They should’ve made more of you (x3).”
They say that times of hardship breed the most powerful art. Never has this been more true.
In a DM, Sanchez told Kotaku that this is the latest in a line of small songs he’s composed on stream: “It’s just something I’ve been doing on the channel, writing little tunes inspired by the games I’m playing, or in this case, the hardware I’m playing on.”
Sanchez, a longtime video game fan whose multi-album-spanning sci-fi saga has been inspired, in places, by games, just began testing the waters on Twitch late last year. He said he’d been “toying” with the idea for the better part of a year, his interest stemming from a time in the past when he and Coheed guitarist Travis Stever lived together, and they’d play and comment on games like Duke Nukem and The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time. Sanchez is currently doing a Twitch test run through the end of January to “ensure that it’s right for me, that I can keep up with the schedule and whatnot.”
It’s all very new for him, the sort of thing that can spark anxiety even in someone who’s played in front of live audiences of thousands of people. That, said Sanchez, is why his song was about our current, very real PS5 predicament and not something more Coheed-esque, like an alternate universe in which they did, in fact, make more PlayStations. “Ha!” replied Sanchez to a very normal question about alternate universes. “I didn’t think much about the words. That’s just what came out. This is certainly a departure from writing for Coheed.”
Now that he’s isolated the problem and taken his first steps into the video game industry, we can only hope that Sanchez will one day fill the PS5 void by releasing his own video game console: the PlayStation Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness.