Cole Cuchna

A robot narrator sings, this is a game of love, and it was you, the one that would be breaking my heart, when you decided to walk away, when I wanted you to stay.

To frame love as a game is to recognize its stakes, the risk and reward at the center of all relationships.

And it's a gamble where the odds are never fully visible.

You can love deeply and still lose, undone by timing, by circumstance, by the misalignment of two lives that were destined to at some point part.

And as our narrator so eloquently expresses, there are few things more devastating than a broken heart.

That's the risk, always.

And yet, we play the game.

We choose to take that chance because, despite the risk, the rewards of love are absolutely worth it, offering as it does the most intense, fulfilling emotions the human experience has to offer.

Now if this were a song performed by a traditional singer, we could end our analysis there.

However, such profound emotions being expressed through a robot voice demands further consideration.

Because it's in this juxtaposition that we uncover one of the central themes of the album.

One that emerges from the way in which Toma and Gimon were using the robot characters this time around.

When asked point blank what the essence of Random Access Memories was, Gimon told NPR quote, This album is about technology going toward humanity.

in a world where humanity is going towards technology.

We tried to capture robotic emotions with music, replacing this time our electronic machines by real human beings."

Toma expanded on this counterintuitive use of the robots, saying, quote, "...we directed an experimental film about seven years ago that was called Electroma, and that followed the story of these two robots in the desert that were somehow desperately trying to become human."

And that's maybe the story of this record, the story of these androids or these robots or these robotic voices that are trying to feel an emotion, or trying to have their robotic side going toward humanity in a world where human beings are gradually going toward technology and toward this idea of robots.

It's maybe something we felt, which is we are two robots trying to become human.

Because it's about artificial intelligence in some sense, but it's in the same way that you have HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey, an artificially intelligent entity that is very elegant and so intelligent that it knows that it's not a human being.

Here it's not about the intelligent side of it, rather than the emotional side of it.