The Opportunity

Game-music fans number in the tens of millions, and they're devoted physical collectors that many record stores aren't serving yet. Unlike the typical streaming listener, gamers listen to a small, curated selection of songs across 100+ hours of gameplay - the songs become part of the fabric of the story they're immersed in, and of its community. Poe and REPOEZESSED have kept their full-length recordings - a narrative backbone of the Alan Wake game universe - entirely off streaming.  The only way to play this music outside the game is on vinyl. The This Road LP offers a rare opportunity to connect with these fans and support their passion for collecting vinyl.

The Music

This Road SIDE A · 14:59

“This Road” is a nine-minute opus that finds Poe weaving the dark trip-hop of her early days, with the heavy layered guitars and orchestrations of her later work, into a piece of music that is entirely new territory for her. The composition takes an impossible four minutes to slow down, almost imperceptibly, from its starting tempo to something that feels like a place where time ends. When you reach the end you are really not sure how you got there but you're glad you did. The deceleration of “This Road” was recorded in one take, live, with bandmates Poe has played with for years. “It was almost impossible to believe that we stayed locked together through the whole otherworldly, out-of-tempo sonic landing,” Poe said. Even engineer Darrell Thorp, who “played” a vintage AMS delay to trigger echoes of Poe's voice, somehow landed every echo in time over a bed of sound whose tempo never stopped moving. What does this mean to the listener? For anyone with the uneasy feeling that they're traveling over the event horizon of this planet's current dystopian moment… “This Road” is a journey worth taking.

6 Deep Breaths SIDE B · EXTENDED 14:59

“6 Deep Breaths” is classic Poe: terror, managed. “Gaslight! Something isn't right...” she sings over a verse beat she designed to make sure she keeps her cool. Think “Control” on Haunted. The chorus of “6 Deep Breaths” is the escape, and the music makes it real - layered, ethereal, a lush dream floating unscathed through utter terror. Poe's voice wafts through the hallways of Remedy's Lake House - the game's literal torture chamber -  “I feel like I'm floating on air, the nightmare can't have my dream,” evidence of her legendary escape from the prison inside the game and from the prison that held her voice hostage in the real world for so many years.  “Six deep breaths, forget all the rest.” Refuse the advice at your peril.

Bio

Poe released her gold album Hello in 1995, a genre-bending “Poe-Mo masterpiece” (Rolling Stone) that included hits like "Angry Johnny" collaborations with a young J Dilla. After years of touring and working with her brother to create the book House of Leaves, Poe released her album Haunted (2000), which Forbes called “one of the best albums of its decade.” All vinyl pressings of Hello and Haunted sold out within weeks - secondary-market copies of Haunted are currently listed at upwards of $389, and as of this posting Hello cannot be found on secondary markets at all.

Hello (1995) - Listen on YouTubeHaunted (2000) - Listen on YouTube

Poe, Sam Lake, and the Alan Wake Universe

While contractual entanglements strangled Poe's voice for some fifteen years, Sam Lake was building a multi-dimensional world in deep part inspired by the work of Poe and her brother - a world that would eventually hand her an escape hatch. Lake and Remedy licensed “Haunted” for Alan Wake (2010); for the sequel, he had Poe sample and expand “September 30th, 1955” - a song of hers he'd discovered on YouTube in 2012 - into what became “This Road.” This time they collaborated directly. “Whatever you do, it's going to be perfect because it's you doing it,” Sam told her - and the session that followed became, in Poe's words, “one of the most transcendent musical moments I've ever experienced in my life.” Alan Wake 2  took three trophies at the 2023 Game Awards from eight nominations - the year's most-nominated game - sold millions of copies, and the collaboration continued into The Lake House, where Poe's escape became literal: game lore merging with her real life.