Megan McDuffee invites you to share in the dark netherworld of her Crimson Legacy on her seductive sophomore album — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
For her second release, the well-known Seattle film / video game composer and engineer plays by her own rules, crafting a strange, scary and sexy selection of electronic, goth and industrial-tinged rock that pays homage to a cinematic cornucopia of sounds, styles, eras, influences and predecessors.
“With Crimson Legacy, I wanted to capture the surrealness and essential weirdness of the 1970s to 1990s movies I grew up with,” McDuffee explains. “Films like Labyrinth, Dark City, Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, Legend, A Clockwork Orange and Rocky Horror Picture Show. They all had a quintessential darkness, griminess and strangeness to them that transported me to a realm of dreams and nightmares.
“That’s what I aim to do with my album — to take the listener into an edgy, disturbing-yet-alluring fever dream filled with lust, revenge and whimsy. Crimson Legacy is for all my fellow weirdos, witches, warlocks, and creatures of the dark corners of the earth… I was inspired by a wide range of artists in crafting this album such as Puscifer, Massive Attack, Nine Inch Nails, Deftones, The Cure, IAMX, Infected Mushroom and Zeromancer.”
Based on that diverse list of influences, Crimson Legacy clearly has a lot of component parts. But in McDuffee’s own tradition, they are expertly blended into something entirely different and wholly her own. With her trademark heavy retro synths, she incorporates a number of modern genres into her passion project: Industrial techno for Your Demise; progressive metal for Forgive Me with RichaadEB; an off-syncopated form of trap/wave for Entity; conventional trap for Twisted.
Fans shouldn’t get it actually twisted, however; while the beat structures in McDuffee’s tracks may be recognizable rave standards, there’s nothing standard about them. Dark, heavy and goth in nature, McDuffee produces far outside of the genre box. Factor in her stunning and heretofore underused voice, her expert sound design and composition and a clear passion for expressing her own dark feelings, Crimson Legacy will make her just as celebrated in the music world as in the film and gaming worlds.
McDuffee grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, and always had something musical going on, from taking private lessons to 11 years of participating in world-traveling choirs. Megan graduated from university a degree in film scoring and electronic music. By day she scores video games, TV shows, and movie trailers, and by night she produces dark, moody, edgy electronica and metal that rides the line between dreams and nightmares.
Megan has collaborated with more than 40 other artists such as Scandroid (Celldweller), Emmy-winning James Dooley, Demondice, Alex and Mitch Murder, to name a few. Megan has won two Game Music Awards for her lauded synthpop score to WayForward‘s River City Girls — Best Independent Composer and Best Retro Soundtrack (2019). She has received a nomination for a Music+Sound Award for her trailer work, and amassed over 3.1 million streams in 2023 alone.
Check out Crimson Legacy below, watch some of her videos above, and worship Megan McDuffee on her website, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
