Chance of a Lifetime (2023 Robots of the 80s album)

Robots of the 80s, photo courtesy the artists

Robots of the 80s introduce us to a wondrous yet dystopian vision of science fiction future in the video for “I Want To Be.” The song with its saturated synth melody and strong rhythms is almost like a sequel to Kraftwerk’s 1978 song “The Robots” with a more modern compositional sensibility and decades of the development of dance beats informing the sequencing of the song. We see the robot in a factory dancing among other robots on an kind of assembly line but this robot attains self-awareness and depicted in both full graphics and the more white outlines in wire framing style the robot speaks to how it wants to be a robot and doesn’t want to be a man but that it wants to be free, presumably to be what a robot is and what it can be free of needing to identify with the human context of existence that instigated it coming into being. The video designed, directed, animated and produced by Lorenz Foth with a robot design for the main character Rael by Dr. Chao Wang is both retrofuturistic and of the moment in terms of how the animations manifest more like an advanced MMO rather than something that would have emerged in the 1980s, project name aside, but with the aesthetics of that decade. It’s a fascinating watch and listen and the first single from the band’s new album Chance of a Lifetime which released on June 2, 2023. Watch the video for “I Want to Be” on YouTube and follow Robots of the 80s at the links below.