Starset released Horizons on October 22, 2021, through Fearless Records. Their fourth studio album ran nearly 71 minutes, expanding a fictional world where technology allows people to experience somebody else’s life. The premise offered an unsettling possibility: escaping reality could mean surrendering your own experiences for another person’s.
“The Breach” accompanied the album announcement in September, with an official video directed by Nick Peterson. On the record, it follows “Unveiling the Architecture,” placing the song near the entrance to that world. Its narrator questions whether he’s truly alive and searches for a way home, giving the larger technological story a personal point of entry.
The writing hadn’t come easily at first. Speaking with Distorted Sound, Dustin Bates recalled feeling creatively drained after the Divisions cycle. Time at home during the pandemic eventually restored his appetite for writing. “I actually have tons more songs in the can from the process,” he said. Choosing 16 tracks was partly about connecting the different styles and ideas he’d explored; he wanted enough material to make the album flow.
Joe Rickard produced the recording and handled engineering and programming, while Bates served as executive producer and Dan Lancaster mixed it. Rickard’s involvement also extended into the writing. He and Bates share songwriting credits with Garrison Turner on “The Breach” and with Rob Graves on the closing “Something Wicked.” The collaboration reached from the album’s opening stretch to its final song.
For all that attention to a fictional universe, Bates welcomed listeners finding their own emotional meanings in the songs. He told Distorted Sound he didn’t want to dictate every interpretation. “Symbiotic” offers an accessible way into that approach: its narrator seeks help from another person and promises to return that support. You don’t need a guide to Starset’s imagined technology to recognize the relationship at its center.
One track had already appeared in connection with another fictional world. “Infected” arrived in April 2021 for the second anniversary of the video game Arknights, as Loudwire reported at the time. The game’s dystopian setting made it a fitting pairing for a band already working with stories about technology and human vulnerability. Months later, the song took its place near the end of Horizons, immediately before “Something Wicked.” It had a life outside the album before becoming part of its sequence.
The album’s visual work continued after release. On July 14, 2022, Starset issued the official “Symbiotic” video, directed by Spencer Sease from a story credited to Bates, Sease and Chris Foster. Bates’s involvement now extended beyond writing and singing the track to helping develop its screen story, giving another song from Horizons a film of its own.
