»It Breaks You« is the second single from Bad Stream’s forthcoming third album »Doom ∞ Bloom,« developed in close collaboration with transdisciplinary artist Arash Akbari. After the first single was heavily influenced by post-minimal music, »It Breaks You« stages its core themes of alienation in the face of digital overload, questions of technology and climatic emergency on a highly energetic electronic rock sound that recalls the aesthetics of the Berlin-based artist Martin Steer’s 2018 debut album under the Bad Stream guise. Once again, the song is accompanied by a video that Akbari created with the help of AI, a tool that he has been working with for years. Much like for the video of the previous single, the album’s title track »Doom ∞ Bloom«, Akbari works with dichotomies and dualisms in order to visualise »how meaning, values, and our environment have been shaped and changed by Anthropocene,« as he says himself.

»It breaks you / It breaks me / I don’t want to live / I don’t want to die,« Steer greets the listener, his voice filtered through a vocoder. While the manipulation of the voice aesthetically reflects the predicament that the lyrics express—everything happens too much, everywhere and all at once while everybody seems to be thoroughly petrified—the music creates a sharp contrast. Both upbeat and driving, highly atmospheric and ominous, it epitomises the core theme of the song and the interdisciplinary »Doom ∞ Bloom« project at large: feelings such as anxiety, depression, and sheer shock in face of fast-paced technological disruption and a climate crisis slouching towards catastrophe are juxtaposed with the artistic and liberating possibilities technology offers this world. This ambiguity is further highlighted through samples of children from the 1960s, talking about how they imagined life in the year 2000. Visions of utopia and dystopia are presented in sound and vision as not entirely detached from, but instead inextricably linked with each other.

»It Breaks You« is part of the »Doom ∞ Bloom« project which grew out of the remote collaboration between the Berlin-based Steer and Akbari, who lives in Tehran. The music will be made available as a stand-alone album on Steer’s ANTIME label in the near future, but its release will also be preceded and complemented by the publication of a number of music videos and various live presentations of the material as well as exhibitions of the project in both physical and virtual spaces. Across different media, »Doom ∞ Bloom« musically and visually explores speculative dystopian and utopian models of a future shaped by the on-going climate crisis as well as processes of technological automation. Rather than just asking questions about how the world may look like after the catastrophe, it dares to imagine possible answers.