The innovative electronic music project mind.in.box will make its long-awaited return in 2023 with a new album called Black and White. Due out August 30, Black and White shoots to the top of my most anticipated albums list.
Stefan Poiss, the man behind mind.in.a.box, announced the new album this morning on social media and promised that further details would be coming soon. In previous posts, he’s revealed that Black and White will contain 16 tracks. At 74 minutes, it will be miab’s longest running album.
Black and White is undoubtedly a reference to the two primary antagonists in an ongoing cyberpunk epic that’s played out across six albums. The story of Agent Black and his supervisor at the malevolent Agency, White, began way back in 2004 in the first miab album, Lost Alone, although they weren’t explicitly named until the following albums, Dreamweb and Crossroads.
Other characters that have appeared in the miab saga include the mysterious Friend and the Sleepwalkers. Stev portrays each character in the songs by modulating his voice with enthralling sound effects.
Black and White is miab’s eighth studio album
Mind.in.a.box has so far released six albums that span the Dreamweb.
In 2010, they released a standalone full-length called R.E.T.R.O that was not part of Agent Black’s storyline. R.E.T.R.O embraced the chiptune renaissance with blippy remakes of C-64 game songs like “Last Ninja” and “Light Force,” as well as an original track called “8 Bits” that remain’s miab’s most popular song.
Mind.in.a.box’s last album was 2017’s Broken Legacies, which represented a bit of a departure for the project. Josh Kreger replaced original miab storyteller/lyricist Markus Hadwiger. It’s unclear who is penning the lyrics on Black and White. Broken Legacies also served as a prequel to the storyline—it took the narrative twenty years backwards in time, to when The Friend created The System.
We have heard one new song from miab since Broken Legacies. In 2020, they released a track called “Television Nation” that was oddly credited to both mind.in.a.box and Stev’s other project, THYX. The lyrics were written by Josh, and the music took an electronic-prog turn.
