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Thanks for posting that gif.  It's very insightful to see the process and the time estimate.

With all of the details in the image, I'm not surprised it took that long.  It looks fantastic.  I'm guessing it will be quite a while before this game is released, but it seems like it will be worth the wait.

Great track, dactypolus. Man, why haven't Portishead done another album since P3 (which is apparently called "Third"?)?

I've been playing Lara Croft Go here and there, and the "Maze of Spirits" soundscape made me think of Howard Shore's brilliant, brittle, crystalline soundtrack for Crash (though it's basically just two tracks repeated over and over in different arrangements).

Your link didn't work for me.  Is it the same as this one?

It's unsettling and creepy, but has a very cool, moody atmosphere.

Yeah, I would love Portishead to release another album.  The gap between the self-titled album and Third was 11 years.  It's been 12 since then, so maybe they'll come out with something soon?

Current track:

Radiohead - Down is the New Up

Cobain's version of "The man who sold the world" is more famous than the original - but I never cared about Bowie.

Bowie's original is fine, but Nirvana's cover is fantastic:

(Cats in the Cradle)

That's a tough one.  This is a really good cover, updated for a more modern audience, but I really like the original.

Here's one that is so different from the original that it's really tough to say which is 'better':

The Cardigans - Iron Man

I love the original, no doubt about that, but I often prefer listening to this one.  It's really relaxing!  I love a cover that totally reinvents the song, and this one definitely does that.

Here's a good one:

José Gonzalez - Teardrop (Massive Attack cover)

As much as I love the original track (which some may recognize as the opening theme for the show House), I just enjoy listening to this one more.  Both are intimate in different ways.  And while looking in the comments of the original track on YouTube, I read that this version was used in the recent Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance.  So that's neat.

José Gonzalez also does a fantastic cover of Heartbeats by The Knife.  It's damn good, but I just don't like it more than the original.

Bono and Edge are indeed talented:

Yeah, that was damn good.  I like the organ coming in at the end.  He couldn't resist joining the fray.

Here's my current track:

Portishead - The Rip

The art and animation look fantastic!

The story sounds interesting, too.  Kudos on using your quarantine time for something useful!

Love this thread. Great tracks guys, but I got to take issue with:

Easily the 2 best Duran Duran tracks.

...  best aside from:

(Hungry Like The Wolf)

Well, Hungry Like The Wolf is a fantastic pop song.  So are Rio and Notorious, but Come Undone and Ordinary World are just great, well written songs that break free of the new wave / new romantic / pop conventions.  Even a sub-par pop-punk band does a nice cover of this one:

Fenix TX - Ordinary World

That Duran Duran stuff makes me think of another great band of the era, Tears for Fears.  Most people love Everybody Wants to Rule the World or Shout.  I have an affinity for Sowing the Seeds of Love and it's Beatles-esque vibes, but this one takes the cake for me, and it has such a fantastic video:

Tears for Fears - Head Over Heels

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsHiG-43Fzg

Talk about distinctive voices.  This may not be hard rock, but the voice is awesome.

I'd like to ask: what hard rock singers (male or female) have a really notable voice in your opinion?

As for distinctive hard rock vocals, I've always loved Eddie Vedder.  There's also other popular bands like System of a Down (Serj Tankian) and Tool / A Perfect Circle (Maynard James Keenan) that have very talented and distinctive vocalists.

Canadians might agree that Our Lady Peace (Raine Maida) and the Tea Party (Jeff Martin) have distinct vocalists.  Something tells me this is more like what you're looking for:

The Tea Party - Temptation

And because you posted Labyrinth, I'll have to post 2 tracks that brought to mind:

David Bowie - Underground

(Not Magic Dance!)

LSD - Genius

Super sweet animated video.

OK, I have to stop now.

Easily the 2 best Duran Duran tracks.  I like their other stuff, but the mood in these is so much better than Girls On Film, The Reflex, etc.

I'm currently listening to:

Phoebe Bridgers - Kyoto

I just finished listening to this great track:

Neon Indian - Deadbeat Summer

I can hear the similarity.

Here's my current track:

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Round And Round

Tronic DX7 - Red Soil (Lower Brinstar)

Yes, a cover of some Metroid music.

The 90s WERE rad!

I think I was introduced to "Awesome Tapes from Africa" through Inkoddi here on the forums years ago, but found this song later. Almost everyone I share it with has a negative first reaction to it, but I think it's bangin'! 

I was grooving to it until the vocals kicked in.  It just didn't seem to fit the tone.  By a couple of minutes into the track, though, I was back into it.

My current track:

Final Fantasy games have great soundtracks.  I love Terra's Theme from FFVI, for example.

Here's a fun track from FFX:

I know the song through American Pie (I checked and that film wasn't released in Norway until December 1999 so there's a chance you didn't see it in the nineties)

I did see it, but probably not in December; it was a pretty busy month for me (military service, university entrance interview, probably visiting my family abroad for Christmas, millennium celebration...). So I'm technically correct! (TBKOC)

Yeah, that soundtrack didn't make any impression on me. I think the only contemporary song off there I was (already) listening to was "Celebrity Skin". I only came to appreciate "Flagpole Sitta" with Peep Show years later.

I liked Flagpole Sitta.  Great catchy track that definitely takes me back to that time.  I also liked Wooly Muffler off that album despite it not being a big pop hit.

As for Hole, I didn't like anything beyond the Live Through This album.  Doll Parts, Miss World, I Think That I Would Die...  Of course, there's also this gem:

Hole - Violet

Still probably one of my favorite songs of the era.  Definitely their best.  Somewhat reminds me of Everlong by the Foo Fighters, but maybe just because it's a clear winner for best track by the band in my mind.

Here are a couple more I'm reminded of:

Hum - The Pod

Of course Stars was the bigger hit, but this song is awesome.  Good album overall.

Fulflej - Microwave

That one takes me back, but it's likely one most haven't heard.

And here's a track I just listened to that kinda fits in:

No Knife - Academy Flight Song

The 90's were pretty rad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLstJH23p7k

Fantastic.  I love this track, and this band in general.

I'm listening to Canyons by Fractal Man:

It's funny you should mention Thru the Eyes of Ruby. I remember a group I hung out with for a while in high school were super into Mellon Collie and found that to be the album defining track. I always really liked it too, the sort of build-up riff (I learned it on guitar; it keeps letting the B string ring open which feels cool while you're playing). Also the effects around the 'breathing underwater, living under glass' part sound so dreamy/watery.

Definitely a great track.  It's a pretty good summation of the album.  I agree that the effects were great in that part.  I always loved how the beginning starts with this dissonant sounding piano, and how the ending basically turns into a completely different song.

As many have noticed, Sweden is taking a very different route here.
I don't want to be another hobby epidemiologist, so I'll just try to convey what the Swedish authorities are doing and saying.

1. We don't think this is a hoax, or exaggerated. We all believe it's very real. We don't congregate and rally to protest the restrictions, like the American rednecks. A vast majority of Swedes actually take a lot of distancing measures.
2. Tegnell isn't a manic street preacher. He's the spokesperson of the national health agency. It has hundreds of scientists and experts.
3. The fundamental idea, based on their simulations and models, is that voluntary social distancing works pretty much as effectively as a hard lockdown. Whether this will turn out true or false is impossible to say at this early phase, but the numbers are quite alarming.
4. A complete lockdown has a number of bad side effects, like increased domestic abuse, children removed from the safety net of society, isolation fatigue and depressions, etc. Can you say it's worth it? Hard to know at this point. But we Swedes have a strong belief in the system.
5. We're doing much worse than our Nordic neighbours, but quite average in a larger perspective. We're not in the top ten when it comes to deaths per capita. We've also reported more deaths than most countries, and Sweden is one of few nations that haven't underreported our deaths.
6. I'm personally a bit divided, and I definitely think there are some areas where restrictions could be much harsher.

If only there weren't so many idiots.  I would rather voluntary social distancing and self isolation be the way here, but there would not be enough volunteers to make it work.  I hate the idea of giving up liberty for safety.  If they were only going to hurt themselves, I'd say to hell with them, but they spread the disease to others and make for a very dangerous situation.  Some people need laws and orders to keep them from doing dumb and hazardous things.  They're kind of like those people who say the only thing that keeps them from murder is their god saying "Thou shalt not kill."  They need to have some morality and rationality of their own.  Common sense is not very common.

So, in the meantime, I'm glad that there are lockdown orders in place (for now), because the threat is very real and people are literally dying in large numbers that can be significantly mitigated by such measures.  It just sets a deadly precedent for what the government is capable of, so I'm wary.

In 1997 I was by choice listening to Skunk Anansi, Prodigy, Chemical Brothers... and looking at the charts, they were filled with "Candle in the Wind", Spice Girls, The Verve, White Town, Chumbawamba... It was the height of "Cool Britannia," and apart from the Friends theme I don't think American pop-rock made a huge impact over here at the time (there was a fair bit of US rap and R&B). Oh, I see Smashing Pumpkins did pretty well with their Batman track. I like that one.

I wasn't listening to that stuff much at the time, but my brother was so I was aware of it.  I liked Breathe by Prodigy more than most of the other stuff in the genre back then, but I've gained a new appreciation for Chemical Brothers and such in more recent years.  The closest I came to that was trip-hop like Portishead, which I was very deeply into.  The stuff on the charts I wasn't much into either.  I've never been a big fan of contemporary top 40 pop radio music.  I was very into rock and hard rock throughout the 90's, primarily the Seattle stuff and similar work, but the Smashing Pumpkins started to get me in the mid 90's.  After the Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness album, I went back to the earlier stuff (I had previously thought of them as annoying because of Billy Corgan's voice, but learned to deal with it because the rest of it was fantastic, and his songwriting was awesome).

I love this one:

The Smashing Pumpkins - Thru the Eyes of Ruby

I got really into long, epic rock music for a while because of Pumpkins stuff like this, Porcelina of the Vast Oceans, Starla, and Soma.  There was plenty of influence from Pink Floyd, like Shine On You Crazy Diamond and the Animals album as well.  A little later, Radiohead's epic Paranoid Android blew me away, like a futuristic version of Floyd.

This one? Yeah, I always liked it, too.

This one was also cool:

Yeah, that movie had a cool soundtrack.  Great stuff, like Seal's Kiss From a Rose, Offspring's Smash It Up, Michael Hutchence's amazing cover of Iggy Pop's Passenger, and good stuff from Sunny Day Real Estate, Flaming Lips, Nick Cave, and PJ Harvey.  Too bad the movie was shit (despite a solid blockbuster cast for that era).  This one reminds me of another soundtrack, actually:

Incubus & DJ Greyboy - Familiar

OK, well the concept for the soundtrack was cooler than the album itself, but I love that track.  And the movie was better than Batman Forever, but could have still been improved.

Had to go listen to this while I was typing:

Sunny Day Real Estate - Pillars

Third Eye Blind had a surprising number of hits for how brief they were at the top of the charts.  Semi-Charmed Life, Graduate, How's It Going to Be, Losing a Whole Year, and Jumper from the self-titled album and Anything and Never Let You Go from Blue were all pretty big, but that was basically a 2 year span and they faded from the forefront as quickly as they came.  I mean, they were / are still around, but they were never nearly as popular as they were in 1997 or so.  Pretty edgy for radio friendly pop stuff, though.

I liked Losing a Whole Year, but Anything is my favorite of theirs.  A quick 2 minute blast:

Third Eye Blind - Anything

A few other songs I love that are short but intense...

Quicksand - Backward

Boysetsfire - Cavity

Chevelle - Mia

Sense Field - Outlive The Man

The mid-late 90's were awesome for hard rock.

But my bad, you were posting 90's pop-rock.  Here are a couple of memorable mid-90's tunes:

Deep Blue Something - Breakfast At Tiffany's

Del Amitri - Roll To Me

One of my favorites:

Tim Follin is a legend.