In 2021, Brian Warner, a.k.a Marilyn Manson became the subject of controversy when Evan Rachel Wood and other various partners from Manson’s life came forward to accuse him of a litany of abuse dating back to at least 2006. While Manson’s career has suffered tremendously in the wake of these allegations, he continues to record and release new music as recently as 2024. I will make a few scant references to the controversy throughout this article where I believe they are relevant, and it’s certainly worth examining his older material through the lens of hindsight.

I think any claims that Manson has always kept his anger and violence within the confines of the music are ahistorical and a total fabrication. I support the accusers’ right to have their stories heard, I believe Evan Rachel-Wood, and I believe that Marilyn Manson has been abusive to multiple former partners.

When I was 11, I didn’t like music.

I just really did not understand why people cared about it enough to invent the radio and the iPod. My mother had a few CDs in the car, one of which was Gorillaz’ Demon Days. My favourite track on this album was Fire Coming Out of the Monkey's Head, a spoken word piece with a hauntingly simple chorus and a very transparent narrative. Perhaps it was because I was (and am) a huge reader, but I just didn’t have much patience for music. If I have to psychoanalyse the mind of my child self to give this article a proper introduction, I suppose that it felt like music suggested an emotion, and I liked clarity and certainty. When the hero died in a book, I knew to feel sad. What exactly was I supposed to feel when Amy Winehouse bemoaned the loss of a tragic, complicated, messy love? I wasn’t even sure I liked girls yet.

When I moved to secondary school, I met a friend who shall remain nameless. We got along really well immediately.

I had an iPod that had nothing but professional wrestlers’ introduction themes, but he had a mobile phone with internet and proper music.

He showed me two things on his mobile phone very shortly after we’d become friends.

The first thing he showed me was the cover of Marilyn Manson’s fourth studio album, The Golden Age of Grotesque. There was something deeply evocative about that cover, a blurred photo of a man that looked more like a shark in stage makeup. That painted white face against the stark black background gave me the feeling that I suppose most other people felt when they first found a piece of music they liked on its own merits, rather than any emotion they may have attached to it given its inclusion in another form of media.

Once we started listening to the album through a shared pair of plastic wired earbuds that were seemingly designed to be as uncomfortable as humanly possible, I remember getting it. I understood why people made the radio and the iPod. If you’ve ever listened to Marilyn Manson’s This Is The New Shit, I’m sure you’ll agree that this is possibly the funniest reaction anyone has ever had to this particular record.

I went home after school that night and asked him for an exhaustive list of the best Marilyn Manson songs, and so began my affinity for a man whose artistic zenith had largely passed before I was ever born, even though he would continue to be a relatively popular musician throughout my life. I was absolutely fascinated by him. While I still clearly hold an affinity, and a deep love, for the records I consider to be his best, Marilyn Manson was the first musician I listened to and enjoyed!

I was enthralled by the idea that a musician could radically reinvent his musical style and aesthetic persona over and over. From the emaciated Worm to the strangely eroticised Omega to the burlesque iconoclast, each transformation felt like another layer of something deeper, more visceral and personal.

Within the space of about six months, which all academics agree is basically a full lifetime to a twelve-year-old, my musical tastes had changed. Ironically, I became a massive Gorillaz fan, which led me onto other alternative rock artists, and slowly drew me towards rap and R&B in my later teenage years. Marilyn Manson fell by the wayside. The phase I went through, where his music and persona felt like a mirror of my own entirely fabricated rebellious streak where I just understood the world on a fuckin’ deeper level man, burned out. I started to explore new genres and artists, no longer confused or wary of art that didn’t tell me how to feel.

But despite all of this, I never fully let go of him. There was always this strange, lingering connection. I would still follow his career, even if I wasn’t always fully invested in his output. I found myself giving everything he released at least one full listen, almost out of obligation, but also a deep-rooted curiosity. It was as if I couldn’t stop wondering if there would be something in his new music that would give me the same feeling I felt standing in the art block on a Tuesday lunchtime.

Looking back, my fandom of Marilyn Manson is likely something a lot of you can relate to, an artist who was pivotal at a certain point in your life, one I’ve always felt a strange obligation to stay connected to even when I’m not actively listening. It doesn't really matter what he releases; there’s some part of me that has to hear it.

And now I suppose I feel the need to work through some of this emotional baggage by giving my childhood self exactly what he wanted: a guide on how exactly each of Manson’s albums makes me feel.

The second thing my friend showed me was a video of an overweight, middle-aged white man getting sucked off by a cow.

I bet you’re glad you’ve been written out of this anecdote now, aren’t you ████?

This is my ranking of Marilyn Manson’s studio albums, from Portrait of an American Family to One Assassination Under God - Chapter 1.

Eat Me, Drink Me

Let’s get the real shit out of the way first, starting with Manson’s sixth studio album Eat Me, Drink Me. It’s hard to find much to say about this album beyond laying down endless negative adjectives in quick succession, which is perhaps the most damning indictment you can make of a piece of art. Eat Me, Drink Me is awful, point-blank period. Manson is six albums deep and a decade removed from his cultural zenith, out of ideas and full of self-loathing. This is not the same artist who tore out the innards of grunge’s twilight and plunged American pop culture straight into Hell. This is an existentially terrified middle-aged man, right in between his most successful period and his eventual reinvention.

There are brief (and I do mean brief) moments where Manson is within touching distance of former glory, particularly the chorus of If I Was Your Vampire where Manson’s vocals feel charged and tortured, but there is so much utter dross on this record that by the end, you feel very much like nothing can be salvaged.

Manson made a puzzling decision to make repeated and pointed references to the style of vocal performance on this album in interviews. He would lie flat on his back and record the songs from a lying position. I don’t know why you would ever do this, and if you’re ever considering this approach a go, I would suggest listening to this album for about twenty seconds and throwing that particular thought straight in the bin. Manson’s voice sounds absurd on this album. It sounds like a SNL impersonator making fun of him. The vocals are grating, processed to hell and back, layered beyond reason and stomach-churning.

Heart-Shaped Glasses is a particular sore point, not only the worst single Manson has ever released but a strong contender for his worst song ever. The pointed references to Lolita are not cute or funny, and less so in the wake of Evan Rachel-Wood’s allegations. Shitting your pants before someone can accuse you of planning to shit your pants is not a win; you’ve still shit yourself.

There are no high points. This is just bad, bad, bad. Up there with the worst albums I’ve ever had the displeasure of being exposed to. This is what emo sounds like when you make the rash decision to play it in front of your friends and they all silently lock eyes with each other wondering who the fuck invited you.

BEST TRACKS: N/A

The High End of Low

If Eat Me, Drink Me and The High End of Low were the only two albums in existence, The High End of Low would be the greatest album of all time—an indisputable classic that redefines music. But obviously, that’s not the case. I just like driving home the point about Eat Me, Drink Me being absolute dick.

This album directly followed Eat Me, Drink Me, and The High End of Low is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. There’s a greater level of precision, a real direction and honestly, there’s clearly some actual effort being applied here. But for the most part, this album does little to climb above being alright. It feels hollow and artificial; it has no teeth. By this point, Manson and Evans-Wood have parted ways and there’s more than a couple allusions to the demise of their relationship that leave a sour taste, particularly the track Leave A Scar, which now reads like more of a tacit admission of guilt than an artistic expression of feeling rejected and left in the wind.

Manson is absolutely lost in the various soundscapes this album tries on and discards. The acoustically driven Four Rusted Horses is particularly gauche, as is Running to the Edge of the World. Manson’s lyrics are almost entirely lacking any bite or catharsis, and while his vocal performances have certainly improved and not been totally barbequed in post, I can’t say he sounds great here; not least because most of what’s coming out of his mouth sounds like the angry ramblings of a teenager who just got dumped by the love of his life. If there’s anything positive to say, Manson has dragged himself out of his absolutely stomach-churning slump, but not by much.

Manson fans have sometimes offered this record up as a better realisation of Eat Me, Drink Me. While I understand what they’re saying, I can’t agree, mostly because I think that particular comment affords this album praise it does not earn. It’s mostly just very forgettable and impotent, whereas Eat Me, Drink Me was palpably awful.

But make no mistake, Manson is spinning his wheels and getting nowhere. There’s some base enjoyment to the rhythm and pulse of We’re From America, but the lyrics are annoying, even if the chorus has an enjoyable pulse and groove. I get it bro, you’re an atheist, and America isn’t that great. That’s awesome. Can you shut the fuck up now?

BEST TRACKS: We’re From America

Born Villain

When putting this article together, I made the ill-advised decision to listen to these albums in chronological order. So, at this point in my listening, Born Villain started as a desperately needed shot in the arm. But of course, Manson’s ability to let you down is never to be underestimated.

The album’s opener Hey, Cruel World promises a blast of energy that has been absent for about ten years. It’s fast and frenetic and even though it’s not great, at this point I’m grateful for scraps. No Reflection continues the pace, and I start to hold onto the idea that maybe it’s going to get better from here. Maybe the suffering is over.

Then Pistol Whipped starts and I feel like my pitiful, worthless life might never meet its end. A feeling I keep coming back to over and over again when working through his worst material is embarrassment. I feel slightly embarrassed that I’m choosing to take time out of my day to give tracks like this the time of day. Overneath The Path of Misery opens with Manson vocal-frying his way through a laboured extract from Macbeth. Are you taking the piss right now? Why are you ruining this for me?

I feel totally lost trying to pick through this material, it is so void of cohesion and purpose. There are single tracks like The Gardener that feel fresher, at least an attempt to cover new ground, but these are really few and far between here. The best parts of Born Villain are obscured behind material that can only be described as benign.

I’m really bored. I would write more, say more but there’s so little to dig into here. At the risk of sounding like a condescending prick, this is intellectual posturing in musical form. I cannot imagine these albums being interesting or revelatory to anyone who has ever heard any other piece of music before in their life.

We’ve left the very worst in the rearview mirror. Thank God. Get me out of here.

BEST TRACKS: Hey, Cruel World / The Gardener

One Assassination Under God - Chapter One

I feel I’ve done a relatively clean job of skirting around the controversy that made Marilyn Manson a hot topic once more in 2021. I don’t think much of his personal life is bleeding into the music in any specific detail until the time of Eat Me, Drink Me: He’s always been an artist who is keen to marry the real world with his artistic vision, and One Assassination Under God - Chapter 1 is no exception.

It feels a little weird for me to go back into his older records and try to retroactively apply the contents of these allegations to records that predate the knowledge of this abusive behaviour by a decade or more. Not because an analysis of that kind is irrelevant or pointless, far from it, but more because I am examining Manson’s career from the perspective of someone who started engaging with it in the early 2010s. By the time I was born, Manson’s cultural zenith had passed. By the time I was old enough to seek out his music for myself on the internet, he was a relic of a bygone era. I wasn’t around for his heyday, and therefore the best I could do when it comes to a historical evaluation would be to regurgitate publicly available information.

But I was here for this. I was an active fan (and a grown man) when these allegations became a matter of public record. As far as the context that informs this record is concerned, I was very much present and aware of all of it. As such, I think it’s important for me to be responsible at this junction: I cannot and will not ignore the obvious elephant in the room.

One Assassination Under God - Chapter 1 is heavier, it’s less accessible than his last two records, but certainly still courting a sound that is safe for the mainstream. However, what sours this record beyond any real redemption is the lyrical content. A lot of tracks like As Sick As The Secrets Within and Nod If You Understand are, in my mind, intentionally skirting the lines between refusing to apologise for Marilyn Manson’s past as an artistic firebrand, and abuse apologia: “What did you expect?”

When Manson says “I won't repent / This is what I was sent here for”, I understand that his explanation for these lyrics would be to say that this is a refusal to apologise for the negative attention he courted in years gone by, and as this album also serves a dual purpose as a sobriety record, the parallels are obvious. However, it also reads in a particularly stomach-churning way when you realise this is the first musical response from a man who has been accused by multiple publicly known partners of a smorgasbord of abuse.

Very little of what is bad about this record has much to do with criticisms the previous entries share, like poor song structure or vocal delivery. I think this sound represents an artistic stagnation similar to the kind Manson was experiencing after the release of Holy Wood, but what makes this record unpleasant for me is the two-faced nature of its lyrical content.

You either did it or you didn’t. But you cannot simultaneously cast allusions to the idea that you’re owning the fact that the self-destructive lifestyle you’ve lived for the majority of your adult life has created chaos for the people who’ve been caught up in it, and cry foul that “Everybody showed up for the execution / But nobody would show their face”.

As a purely musical endeavour, this album is not as bad as the previous entries. It just isn’t, and therefore I can’t mark it among his worst works. Gun to my head, I’d still rather listen to this and ignore the obvious real-world allusions than suffer the indignities of Eat Me, Drink Me and its immediate successor.

But it is uncomfortable and, as selfish as this sounds, it makes me sad. It makes me sad that an artist who had such a transformational impact on my ability to enjoy and engage with music has wound up here. The art cannot be separated from the artist in any of these tracks; Manson’s allusions to the controversy are woven throughout every bit of this. As such, I actually cannot find a single track in here that doesn’t feel too close to the bone for me to look past.

It’s depressing, it’s a bit boring, it’s gross, and I don’t want to think about it anymore. I cannot honestly say that this is the end of my time listening to Manson’s new material: I doubt that day will ever come. But if nothing else, One Assassination Under God - Chapter 1 confirms to me that whatever good can be found in his output, it stops here.

BEST TRACKS: N/A

The Golden Age of Grotesque

Some months ago I started playing a game with friends. Without any context, I played Manson’s cover of Tainted Love, taken from this album, for as long as they wanted (or could stand to hear, in most cases). Then, I would ask them to guess the year of release. Of the ten or so people I surveyed, the vast majority correctly guessed that it was released after the turn of the century but before 2005. Interestingly, everyone who incorrectly guessed the exact year of release gave 2007 as their answer.

What that suggests, I don’t know, but I do know this: The Golden Age of Grotesque might be the perfect post-9/11 artwork ever created.

After two commercial jets are flown into skyscrapers in the heart of America’s most iconic city, killing thousands and triggering a largely pointless, expensive war that would devastate the Middle East with little to no positive outcomes, there’s absolutely nothing terrifying about a thirty-four-year-old man in makeup.

Manson’s shift towards burlesque aesthetic around this time was very entertaining and engaging. But those stylings don’t make much impact on the music itself beyond brief vignettes like Theatre or (imagine a deep inhalation here) Baboon Rape Party. Yes, a thirty-something-year-old thought that was a cool title for an instrumental bonus track. I can find no evidence that a fourteen-year-old boy got the naming rights for this track, so Manson has to bear this particular indignity.

Manson is not unaware of his position as a has-been-boogeyman, openly admitting that “Everything has been said before / Nothing left to say anymore” on the opening lyrics of the record. This is an intensely bold statement to make right before you ask an audience to spend almost an hour listening to your artistic output, and leaves you with relatively few options. Perhaps the most obvious are the following: try to examine where your implied artistic irrelevance leaves you in the landscape of an industry that has gotten used to your once-imposing presence, or have fun. Manson chooses the second, inviting the listener to come and “see the mobscene” just for the sake of it.

The ‘mobscene’ in question, however, is largely a retread of many of the ideas Manson had explored in his previous studio effort, Holy Wood, with less anthems. Holy Wood is marked not only by the sheer number of fun songs but also by Manson’s critiques of consumerist culture: The Golden Age of Grotesque is an attempt to revel in the sheer dumb fun of being a rockstar, but a lot of this album isn’t all that fun. While I’ll stand by This Is The New Shit and Use Your Fist And Not Your Mouth being fun romps, it’s hard not to see languishing and downright embarrasing tracks like Ka-Boom Ka-Boom as the writing on the wall.

Para-Noir too, feels like a missed opportunity, the female vocal track serving as tongue-in-cheek setup for a decadent and indulgent track that Manson buries with a cringe-worthy chorus that descends into self-parody. Manson’s aforementioned cover of Tainted Love feels like a two-pronged low point, not simply a tacit admission that he’s run out of original ideas but a total phone-in, a lazy attempt to recreate the success of Sweet Dreams in the age of nu-metal, a genre Manson seemed to look down his nose at despite failing to provide a compelling counter-offer.

The concept era is over, and the cat is out of the bag. It will take an age for Manson to rediscover a cohesive vision. If you’re planning on revisiting Manson’s catalogue in chronological order, you’d better try your damndest to enjoy this one. It’s the last time you’re going to have fun for about a decade.

BEST TRACKS: This Is The New Shit / Use Your Fist And Not Your Mouth

WE ARE CHAOS

WE ARE CHAOS was released during the COVID pandemic, a time where quite literally nobody on the face of the Earth needed more misery and nihilism in their life. I think, whether by coincidence or intention, WE ARE CHAOS manages to give Manson a more positive and enjoyable outlook. There are more than a few moments where he wallows in cynicism and pity, but it doesn’t feel laboured or forced. Strangely, there’s something that feels quite unifying in the way this record progresses and expands. Manson hasn’t been an outsider for a long time and he isn’t trying to be.

Perhaps the most divisive entry in his discography, WE ARE CHAOS is unashamedly Bowie-esque. While portions of this album are a success, and there are some great tracks, I really cannot get along with the mix of this record. There are some extremely strange choices made with the placement of Manson’s vocals in the soundscapes, where he sounds buried and struggling for presence, particularly in tracks like INFINITE DARKNESS. There’s a puzzling moment on HALFWAY & ONE STEP FORWARD where Manson’s vocal track seems to get turned down during the second verse. By this point, I’m getting slightly worn out by the production style in general too. It feels less like Manson is drawing on classic rock influence to shape his own works and more like he’s performing a pastiche of both his own works and the history of the genre.

DON’T CHASE THE DEAD is an enjoyable throwback and Manson is still enjoying a new maturity afforded to him by The Pale Emperor, but I feel very much by this point that Manson needs to find a new angle. I think there are moments where he comes close to it but seems to slightly retreat from fully embracing it, such as the title track where Manson goes full Bowie and angles toward something less personal or introspective and more exterior. It doesn’t fully land for me, mostly because I don’t think Manson has found the perfect mix of individuality and outside influence.

Nothing on here is downright embarrassing like some of his weaker efforts, but by the same token, very little of this material generates much intrigue. I think every artist who sticks around long enough has a wallpaper album, pleasant but unremarkable, and WE ARE CHAOS is Manson’s.

BEST TRACKS: DON’T CHASE THE DEAD / KEEP MY HEAD TOGETHER

Heaven Upside Down

It’s a bit surprising to label Heaven Upside Down as one of Manson’s weaker efforts, especially considering it’s far from a total misfire. While the album may not reach the heights of The Pale Emperor, it still offers plenty of moments worth celebrating. Manson’s ability to reinvent himself and produce engaging material remains intact, though this album does feel like it’s still finding its footing after the success of its predecessor. It throws off the purposeful malaise of The Pale Emperor, but whether it finds a suitable emotional replacement is debatable.

The album opens strongly, with Revelation #12 stripping back some of the more bluesy elements of The Pale Emperor and providing one hell of a tone setter. It’s fast, frenetic, Manson’s vocals are pronounced and strong, it’s great, and then it feels like Manson starts to keep his cards held very tightly indeed. Tracks like Tattooed In Reverse maintain the slick and classy production, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that this album is slightly in awe of the success of its direct predecessor and trying to straddle the line between committing to a new direction and not upsetting the apple cart.

Unfortunately, there are some moments that represent an objective regression. JE$U$ CRI$I$ is mostly real enjoyable, and the back half of the song is just brilliant, the low, throbbing instrumentation providing some real edge to Manson’s howls. His voice still sounds fresh, like he’s rolled back the clock fifteen years. Unfortunately, the song is also home to the worst chorus Manson has maybe ever written, eye-rollingly bad. But pleasantly, this sticks out like a sore thumb precisely because it’s a real misfire on a record that is otherwise hitting the mark.

One thing I enjoy about this record is its confidence. We Know Where You Fucking Live isn’t reinventing the wheel, nor is presenting itself as such: It’s just having fun. Kill4Me has a similar purpose with an enjoyable rhythm and melody, though I think it’s fair to say the writing has taken a decline, with SAY10 being a good example, indulging in a scope or an energy that I don’t think Manson is ever really earning with his lyrics.

This feels like Manson’s take on a pop record, something to be enjoyed on a surface level and yet there are some surprises to be had. Saturnalia feels expansive, glacial and huge. The best moments on this album feel really big and there’s some genuine merit to that. Blood Honey is perhaps the nicest surprise on the album in some ways: THIS is what Eat Me, Drink Me could’ve been!

I think if this album managed to keep anything from The Pale Emperor, it’s the class. This is a collection of songs that I think are objectively more accessible: The Pale Emperor is hardly an esoteric record but one that relies on an audience familiar with Manson’s career, the highs and the lows, for maximal effort.

It’s hard for me to be particularly objective about this era of Manson. By the time this album was released, I was riding so high off the immensity of The Pale Emperor that I think I was always going to give this album more than a fair chance. Heaven Upside Down, in many ways, is a reinvention record for fans who stopped listening to Manson at the turn of the century. It’s a companion album to The Pale Emperor, playing with similar ideas and with a slightly less dense and pronounced sound signature, and a fair few issues. But I think there’s real merit to a lot of this one.

BEST TRACKS: Revelation #12 / Saturnalia / Kill4Me / We Know Where You Fucking Live / Heaven Upside Down / Threats of Romance

Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death)

With Mechanical Animals, Manson underwent a total aesthetic reinvention, trading his grotesque, industrial menace for neon-soaked glam rock, and the gamble paid off. That success, coupled with the album’s stark departure from his earlier work, meant that when it came time to make Holy Wood, Manson had the rarest of luxuries: complete creative freedom.

Or at least, he should have. Because while Manson had the industry capital to go in any direction he wanted, his public standing had just taken a brutal hit. His unfortunate role as the most identifiable scapegoat for the Columbine High School shooting meant that he was no longer just playing with fire but caught right at the epicentre of the blaze. It’s one thing to wear the aesthetics of danger and darkness; it’s another to be blamed for inspiring two teenagers to massacre their classmates. It didn’t matter that Manson’s connection to Columbine was entirely erroneous, based on quite literally nothing whatsoever; the damage was done.

It’s difficult to say how much of an impact this had on the record when all was said and done. Undeniably, this is one of Manson’s most accessible works, a kind of warped victory lap where Manson attempts to deliver anthem after anthem, and succeeds in part. The first stretch of this album is bombastic and energised, delivering some of Manson’s most viscerally enjoyable tracks (for my money, The Fight Song is one of his best singles ever) but there’s a sense that the edges have been sanded down slightly too much.

One of Antichrist Superstar’s greatest strengths is how it straddles the line between gothic performativity and genuine malice, and I’m sorry, but tracks like In the Shadow of the Valley of Death feel out of place, forcing the momentum to halt for no good reason. There’s a pretty sallow stretch of material after album highlight The Nobodies, where Manson seems to be working through ideas he hasn’t fully mapped out. There’s a version of this album where Manson culls most of the back half (save for a few essential tracks), and it stands shoulder to shoulder with his very best work.

The saving grace of Holy Wood is two-fold: no matter where you are in the record, you’re never too far from one or two really enjoyable tracks in succession, and the first half of the record is simultaneously well-paced and frenetic. But after such a visceral opening fifteen minutes, it feels like Holy Wood is trying to get back on track and never quite finds its groove again. I realise this particular review reads harshly, but to be clear, there is a LOT to enjoy on here. With that said, however, for me this is Manson’s first notable stumble.

BEST TRACKS: The Love Song / The Fight Song / Disposable Teens / Target Audience (Narcissus Narcosis) / “President Dead” / Cruci-Fiction in Space / A Place in the Dirt / The Nobodies / Born Again

Portrait of an American Family

Time for a confession: the decision to write this article is what prompted my first ever full listen to Portrait of an American Family. I’d never carved out time for a full listen, mostly because of its reputation among Manson fans, a fun but ropey grunge-esque shock-rock shlock-a-thon. It’s not hard to see why this opinion has stuck, given that Antichrist Superstar represented such a violent deviation from the mainstream and catapulted Manson from seedy backroom shows in Florida to the biggest rockstar on the planet.

But they’re wrong. Portrait of an American Family, despite its shortcomings, is one of the most frenetic, entertaining albums Manson has ever released. It is undeniable that Manson is taking major cues from the grunge movement, and yet he seems aware that it’s coming to a close, and is within touching distance of something else. The album opens with an incredibly ‘90s spoken word piece, and you’d be forgiven for thinking an Eat Me, Drink Me level disaster was impending. But the most surprising thing about Portrait of an American Family is the levity it treats itself with: you are supposed to find this campy, over-the-top, shlocky. While the album certainly tackles serious topics, there’s an undeniable sense of not taking any of it too seriously, but in a very double-edged way. On one hand, this is an accessible album full of fun sounds and catchy anthems, not an academic paper or a literary masterwork. But on the other hand, a feeling that still holds water today: everything is so fucked that it can’t be fixed.

Unlike Antichrist Superstar’s white-hot nihilism or Mechanical Animals’ glitzy, alienated autopsy of fame, the album doesn't attempt a higher concept or overarching narrative. It’s a tongue-in-cheek ribbing of the total apathy of American culture, Manson demanding that the “white trash, get down on your knees” and continue to consume with no regard for the filth that has infected every facet of consumption in American life. Manson is less a demon from Hell and more a Mad Hatter style curator of a wild ride through a psychedelic glam-punk punch-up. The penultimate track My Monkey is the only one I can mark as a dud, slamming the brakes on the momentum from Snake Eyes and Sissies, though this sin is quickly absolved as Manson closes the record with Misery Machine, which could well be the best track on the entire thing. Even on the tracks where Manson’s lyrics and vocals are slightly spinning their wheels, the instrumentation is sharp and inventive throughout, with some serious groove always shoving its way to the forefront.

While the bare bones of Antichrist Superstar and later efforts appear in pieces across the record, this is a unique entry in Manson’s discography that deserves its flowers. All the impotent defenses of utter dross like Eat Me, Drink Me and The High End of Low should instead come to Portrait of an American Family’s aid and provide this album with the reappraisal it wholeheartedly deserves. Easily the nicest surprise this deep dive has provided.

BEST TRACKS: Cake and Sodomy / Lunchbox / Dope Hat / Get Your Gunn / Dogma / Snake Eyes And Sissies / Misery Machine

Antichrist Superstar

It’s hard to listen to Portrait of an American Family and come away with a clear idea of where Marilyn Manson might go next. Their debut effort has some real heaviness and subversive ideas, but can’t quite step out of the shadow that grunge had cast over the rock landscape of the ‘90s. But while Cobain’s death in 1994 undoubtedly changed the genre’s trajectory, it wasn’t a death knell. Nirvana may have ceased to exist on the 5th April 1994, but their contemporaries were still going strong. Alice in Chains’ eponymous third album topped the Billboard 200 on its release in 1995 and Pearl Jam’s No Code (released some three months before Antichrist Superstar) achieved the same milestone. Both were huge sellers, but both were similarly marked for feeling dated and uninteresting, fairly or not. Grunge was on life support, waiting for its inevitable end.

In 1996, Marilyn Manson released Antichrist Superstar, torched the remains of grunge, and danced in the ashes. Far from Cobain’s self-loathing, flannel-clad caterwauling or Soundgarden’s towering power ballads, Manson was a filthy, perverse, and downright frightening reanimation of glam rock. Grunge was, at its core, a reality-fantasy, young men who looked normal and became reluctant global icons. Manson was a rail-thin, deranged iconoclast who claimed to be the antichrist — and played the part to perfection.

He didn’t shy away from the spotlight; he demanded to be seen, to be gawped at. As America teetered on the edge of a full-blown culture war, Manson almost singlehandedly reignited the Satanic Panic of decades past and made himself public enemy number one.

Antichrist Superstar is ostensibly a concept album, imagining a rockstar who destroys the “world”, whatever that may be. While there’s endless write-ups on the influences and hidden meanings to much of the album, the story is relatively straightforward. But beyond the narrative, Manson’s second album is a maelstrom of furious nihilism. There’s little left in terms of camp and shlock, and this departure from the messy psychoactive glitz of Portrait Of An American Family is undoubtedly the most important tonal shift of Manson’s career. It’s undoubtedly messy, and like the vast majority of Manson’s albums, it’s frontloaded. Several songs in the middle section blur together—not because they sound alike, but because they lack presence. The highs here are numerous though, from the immediate explosion of Irresponsible Hate Anthem to the eerie nursery-rhyme style Cryptochid or the anthemic title track, and that’s all without mentioning The Beautiful People, undoubtedly Manson’s most iconic song ever. This isn’t just the peak of the band’s cultural power and commercial success, but a genuinely important landmark in contemporary musical history.

BEST TRACKS: Irresponsible Hate Anthem / The Beautiful People / Dried Up, Tied, And Dead To The World / Tourniquet / Little Horn / Mister Superstar / 1996 / Minute of Decay / The Reflecting God

The Pale Emperor

2015 should’ve been a year that saw Manson release another largely ignored artistic misfire. There was very little in the last ten years to suggest Manson had anything other than one or two interesting ideas per studio project left to offer. The self-proclaimed antichrist superstar had gotten fat and lazy. His musical output had become hackneyed. His live shows were becoming an embarrassment, and he seemed caught in a paradox—realizing he was no longer an imposing cultural shockwave while desperately trying to recapture that infamy despite continued failure.

It seems that he finally realised that it is simply not possible for a middle-aged man who’d been famous for nearly two decades to inspire much fear in anyone. So he stopped. Instead, he embraced a new sound and found complete reinvention in The Pale Emperor. This is not simply Manson finally rediscovering his form, but reaching a new artistic peak. Gone are the costumes, the posturing, the endless chase of a youth that had long since passed. This is a one-time cultural titan finally accepting that, at least as far as his cultural presence is concerned, he’s little more than a memory, a relic of a by-gone era, the anti-hero of a micro-period now looked back on as slightly absurd, almost laughable in hindsight. The mighty US of A was scared of this guy?

An emperor made pale by creative decay? Cultural translucence? Age? Perhaps it’s all of these things, and Manson takes the internal to task as harshly as he did the external world in his hayday. But this is not a has-been rolling over, showing his belly to the world and saying ‘yes, you’re right, I’m a loser and I suck now’. In Manson’s own words, “The past is over / Now passive seems so pathetic”.

I view this as a tacit admission that Manson has failed to put his best foot forward for several years. Since The Golden Age of Grotesque, he’s failed to find an evolution to his signature sound that provides the genesis for a creative reinvention. But now, backed by lingering guitars and thumping percussion, The Pale Emperor feels like a defibrillator, shocking Manson into the kind of artistic freneticism he’d been lacking since the turn of the century.

The production across the album is not only inventive, but indulgent in a way that provides some real catharsis. There’s real class here too, particularly in the percussion that undercuts every song with so much natural swagger and confidence. Manson, too, sounds fantastic across the record, matured and full-bodied. From the agonising howls on Third Day of a Seven Day Binge to the snarling self-condemnation on Deep Six, it’s like an entirely different person has inhabited Manson’s voice and energised him, like "a stranger had a key, came inside my mind / And moved all my things around”. Manson’s nauseating love-affair with endlessly-layered vocals, which endlessly drowned even the most impressive production work, are largely absent here, his voice powerful and laid bare. Everything in the instrumentation and mix is so cleverly balanced here, never leaving Manson adrift in the heavy instrumentation and never hanging him out to dry.

It’s difficult to find a more fitting metaphor than this: Manson is a man who went to bed at twenty-seven, and didn’t realise he’d aged a day until 2015. The Pale Emperor is so fresh and classy and weighty that it makes everything post-Eat Me, Drink Me feel worth it. If The Pale Emperor was the payoff for Manson’s noughties output, then consider that a deal well done.

In many respects, this is Manson’s Blackstar, a full-throated acceptance of his mortality. Manson isn’t just opining his emotional vulnerability to hollow instrumentation before retreading old ground, but putting everything out on the table, even his trepidations about allowing himself to be open and honest, being “open too much”.

The Pale Emperor is not only a worthy successor to Manson’s greatest albums, but the first time since Mechanical Animals that his music has represented a triumphant full-blown reinvention. Manson is done with chasing the highs of yesteryear, wallowing in pity and basking in self-reflected glory. Manson hasn’t just finally found something new to say, but has provided plenty of reasons to hear him out.

BEST TRACKS: Killing Strangers / Deep Six / Third Day Of A Seven Day Binge / The Mephistopheles of Los Angeles / Warship My Wreck / Slave Only Dreams To Be King / The Devil Beneath My Feet / Odds of Even

Mechanical Animals

By 1998, Marilyn Manson was an American household name. Within two years and with just one studio album reaching the mainstream, he had become the poster-boy for moral panic, an emaciated freak who’d seemingly appeared overnight and turned the world upside down. Fans of the band expected everything to get heavier, nastier. Antichrist Superstar is certainly heavy, but Manson had smashed pop culture wide open with a level of overt subversion rarely seen before. It only made sense that he’d double down and shift the window even further.

In a way, he did. But he managed to do it in a way that surprised everyone and alienated more than a few. Just as the public fixated on Manson as a skeletal demagogue corrupting America’s youth, he reemerged as something entirely different: an entirely artificial pop star from the stars called Omega.

If you compare images of Manson from 1997 to 1998, there’s a stark difference. Many people draw the obvious comparison to Ziggy Stardust, but often as a point of critique or dismissal, that Manson was simply echoing the artistic calls of yesteryear. This is entirely fair on the surface, but I think this criticism ignores Manson’s intentional references to the past.

Omega is supposed to be deeply evocative of Ziggy Stardust. Where Manson’s glam rock persona separated from Stardust was in its deeply strange eroticism. Omega was bright and colorful, with a slight gothic edge and often sported skintight lycra: Omega also had fake breasts and too many fingers. It’s easy to read that and write it off as Manson being edgy in a very teenage way, but I don’t think it was supposed to be edgy for the sake of it. There’s a weird invocation of the markers of traditional sexual appeal, woven into things that didn’t seem quite human. This was an image of sexuality that had been warped slightly too far, and this idea of excess ad absurdum is a major factor in the narrative of Mechanical Animals.

Ziggy Stardust sees an androgynous rockstar fall to Earth as a would-be saviour to the people before his own ego condemns him. It is ultimately about a man who arrives to fix a system before succumbing to it himself. He is a hopeful figure destined to change the world who is defeated by himself.

Mechanical Animals sees an androgynous figure fall to Earth before becoming quickly swept up into an industry of fast and filthy excess. Ultimately, Omega is swallowed entirely and becomes another cog in a system that had no need nor desire for a saviour. Omega is entirely constructed to fit the strange world of Mechanical Animals, manufactured to perfection.

I’m not making the argument here that Mechanical Animals is nothing like The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, quite the opposite. In many ways, it’s the core concept of Ziggy Stardust, repurposed and refitted. It’s louder, more raw and ultimately more hopeless. Ziggy Stardust offers a chance at change, Mechanical Animals offers nothing of the sort.

This was hugely upsetting to a considerable portion of Manson’s fanbase, a betrayal of his raison d’etre. But with the benefit of hindsight, Manson’s decision to commit to a complete one-eighty, both aesthetically and musically, was the single best choice he ever made. Antichrist Superstar, in my opinion at least, manages to deliver a dose of genuine malice that doesn’t overstay its welcome. How exactly could a man who now had a seat at the table replicate the feeling of that record? It is distinctly counter-culture and, really, it was Manson’s attempts to recapture that danger across the noughties that led to his artistic nadir. It’s a trick you get to play once.

So Manson didn’t play it again. Instead, he gave us Mechanical Animals, a distinctly digital window into the destructive excess of fame. The aforementioned narrative at play isn’t particularly obvious, nor is it a strict structural framework. But I think the point of this album is that the narrative is secondary to the excess. The story is struggling to be told through a drug-fuelled haze of apathy. Tracks swell to their crescendo and sputter out into digital noise, moving through perspectives and emotions wildly. Great Big White World starts an expansive vision of falling down to Earth before The Dope Show slams us immediately into a decadent vision of the top of the mountain, and the album oscillates between these two worlds constantly. The titular track is one of a few that bridge the gap, but one of the most striking things about Mechanical Animals is how certain tracks like The Speed of Pain feel like pockets of warped lucidity in a maelstrom of glitzy, clinical decadence when set against tracks like Disassociative.

And Manson manages to handle all of this while making Mechanical Animals eminently listenable. Between traditional rock songs like Rock is Dead and Coma White or tongue-in-cheek anthems like I Don’t Like The Drugs, But The Drugs Like Me and I Want to Disappear, you’re just having a hell of a lot of fun from start to finish. Manson never lets the consequences of this fun get too far in the rear-view mirror, though, and I think that’s what elevates this record from a good one to a genuinely great one.

There’s a cohesion to this record Manson never quite captured again. It’s a deeply enjoyable record with some pithy remarks, some genuinely sombre moments and a rich tapestry of excess and indulgence. Even the moments that don’t entirely land for me hold some objective merit in their furtherment of these themes and I can appreciate their value. In many ways, this backlash to this album and its then-historic descent from the charts probably caused Manson’s regression and stagnation and I think that is a terrible shame, because this record is a genuinely engrossing picture of the lonely, lonely summit. But perhaps that’s a fitting endpoint.

BEST TRACKS: Great Big White World / The Dope Show / Mechanical Animals / Rock Is Dead / Disassociative / Posthuman / I Want to Disappear / I Don’t Like The Drugs, But The Drugs Like Me / New Model No. 15 / Coma White

And we’re done!

This was a lot of fun to put together. At points, it was also deeply painful and draining. I’m endlessly grateful to anyone who managed to get their way through an article that started as a general retrospective and then spiralled into this. It’s difficult for me to find topics that I’m interested in writing at length about sometimes, mostly because I come up with a general idea of time and effort required and vastly exceed those boundaries very quickly. Thankfully, this didn’t happen with this one and, if nothing else, I’m pleased I managed to commit to an ambitious amount of work and just about crawl over the finish line.

I’m also extremely pleased that I can stop now. Don’t expect to see articles of this size of scope ever again.

It takes strength to be gentle and kind”

Britain in 1986 was, largely, not a happy place.

Still in the throws of post-war recovery, the unemployment rate rose beyond 11% as the end of the country-wide miners’ strike struck a significant blow to the power of the trade union movement. The pound collapsed. A generation raised by parents who had seen a still-unprecedented global war is navigating the height of their adolescence and the blossoming of adulthood. The world marches toward a new age of technological prosperity, the world changing overnight, every night, with Britain being no exception.

Too early to grow alongside the technological globalisation of the nineties and noughties, too young to really remember the war and understand what it had done to the world, what was lost and could never be reclaimed. To feel adrift, at the mercy of a society that has no place for you is not a new feeling. The generation primed to hear The Smiths were perhaps more predisposed to this feeling than any that preceded them. 

It is the group’s own discontent, fuelling the creative engine, that produced their defining masterwork The Queen Is Dead. Often likened to a state of the union, the third studio album by the English indie outfit is a frank and often frenetic examination of finding solace in a world that wants nothing to do with you. Recorded throughout 1985, the album is an emotional crisis in musical form: Morrissey is at his most maudlin and silver-tonged, oscillating between total rejections of authority and desperate pleas to be accepted and loved, by himself as much as others. Often, a lot of what makes The Smiths work is lost in listening to assorted singles, or skipping through compilation albums. Perhaps Morrissey comes off as smarmy, self-obsessed or mopey. What you might miss, and what The Queen Is Dead proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the funny, introspective and ultimately hopeful man exists alongside the seemingly self-condemned crooner.

The guitar work of Johnny Marr and Andy Rourke here (on electric and bass respectively) is a marked departure from the bright, clean melodies that drove hits like “This Charming Man” and “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”. The jangle and glam of previous efforts are present in spirit but toned down, welded together with a rougher, more organic sound.

I want to take some time to write about my favourite song on the album, perhaps my favourite from the group’s entire discography, “I Know It’s Over”.

To call this track depressing is to both sell it short and misrepresent it. The sharp, cutting bravado of the previous tracks has gone. It’s a lull in the momentum, but entirely intentional and pointed. It’s a story as old as time: Morrissey’s lover has left him, and moved on with another man. He cries out to his mother, telling her “I can feel/The soil falling over my head”, the crushing emotional weight of loss like a living death. As he sings “I know it’s over - still I cling/ I don’t know where else I can go”, the instrumentation thickens and swells, the emotion one feels when first actualising the worst of their thoughts: it really is over, for good. The second verse repeats the first, the instrumental dissipating; the ebb and flow of loss and grief. 

Contemplations of suicide with “The sea wants to take me/the knife wants to slit me” are quickly followed by the line “Do you think you can help me?”. It’s an emotional tug-of-war we have all felt, the loss of love compelling us to cry out for help and to wish for it to all be over. Either will work, but this pain must cease. Morrisey’s ego is dissected and laid bare with frank recollections of his lover’s blunt words: “if you’re so very entertaining/then why are you on your own tonight?”

The self-aggrandising language paints a vivid picture: His vanity came before his love for the woman he now mourns the loss of. These lines are followed with the most powerful and most famous phrase of the song “it’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate/it takes strength to be gentle and kind”, then repeated with “guts” replacing “strength”. His repetition of her wounding words tore his ego down, now he rebuilds himself with lamentations over the man he’d like to be. Before, her new man was the “loud, loutish lover”, now “love is natural and real/but not for such as you and I”

“I Know It’s Over” succeeds in no short part because it encapsulates what made The Smiths so compelling: a complete, succinct story that says something true of all of us. We lose something we love and we mourn. We look inward, tear apart our faults, question our decisions, and hate ourselves for failing. But when we hit rock bottom, we climb out by envisioning not only the recovery from heartache we so desperately crave but the dream that, perhaps, we can be even better than we were. 

The song ends with the repetition of “I can feel the soil falling over my head”, each line climbing the vocal scale, descending into little more than atonal wailing toward the end. It’s a crashing and emotional crescendo: the lines that opened the song still plague Morrissey’s mind, but this time backed by energy and freneticism that make it clear: it will get worse, but it will also get better.

Recovery and healing are not linear. A good day can be followed by a sea of bad ones. Several weeks of optimism and smiles can be crushed by a familiar scent, a drunken text, a cherished song that once symbolised something so beautiful but now, something else. 

Love is natural and real. It is also beautiful. It is rarely easy.

By “modern PlayStation systems”, they meant it was being ported to PlayStation 4, a ten-year-old console. While no mention was made of PlayStation 5, we were left to presume that this was a clever piece of PR-speak, where the game would be playable on PlayStation 5 via backwards compatibility, while not being developed to take any specific advantage of the newer hardware. This was true when the game was eventually released, though a 60fps patch was released a few months later, likely a cobbled-together belated apology for not doing quite a lot more.

Rumours have swirled abound for a long while about Rockstar doing something to Red Dead Redemption. All of it was taken with a pinch of salt, considering that sources were no more solid than anonymous Reddit threads and supposedly “trusted” leakers. The first, more prevalent rumour was as follows: Red Dead Redemption will be getting a remaster for modern consoles, meaning that the original game will be preserved, and enhanced with quality-of-life changes to streamline the experience both visually and mechanically.

The second was far more ambitious and, frankly, fantastical: Red Dead Redemption will receive a full-scale remake in the style of its far more recent sequel, 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2. As such, it will feel far more like the next big Rockstar release, a studio infamous for extremely long development cycles, instead of a simple refresh of a modern classic.

Unfortunately, neither was true.

Red Dead Redemption was re-released for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch on August 17th. That’s less than a fortnight between the official announcement and release.

No changes were made to the original 2010 release. It includes the massively popular “Undead Nightmare” expansion pack, which was released in the same year. It does not include the multiplayer mode.

It cost more in 2023 than it did in 2010. No new content, a 13-year-old product, and a higher price tag. If this sounds like the most unappealing deal of all time, rest assured that it topped the PlayStation store charts in the UK, and came in fourth on the US PlayStation store in August.

Why?

Red Dead Redemption was an odd decision for Rockstar Games. Released two years after Grand Theft Auto IV redefined the scope and scale of the open-world genre, Rockstar decided to follow this up with something of a Wild West anti-fantasy game. Set in 1911 at the tail end of the era of outlaws and robbers in American history, as civilisation consumes every corner of the land, the game is a spiritual sequel to Rockstar’s 2004 title Red Dead Revolver. Narratively, it doesn’t elaborate on the original story (in fact, Red Dead Revolver is folklore in Redemption’s universe) but instead follows a brand new direction.

Where Grand Theft Auto has always been a colourful, crass critique of American consumerism and ignorance, Red Dead Redemption took a different tonal direction. Following former outlaw John Marston, it tells the story of a man whose days as a gun-toting cowboy are over. Or at least, he wants them to be. Once belonging to the Van der Linde gang, Marston and his family are held to ransom by government agents to assist in their efforts to hunt down the remaining former gang members.

The game is sparse and haunting, with most locations being working ranches, ghost towns and small settlements. While the player meets a cast of vibrant and engaging characters, perhaps the most impressive thing about Red Dead Redemption is how it manages to make the world feel like it’s on the cusp of transformative change, with the undesirables pushed out across the quickly receding frontier. It feels empty, but not in a negative way. It’s a game that thrives on open, organic spaces, broken up by abandoned shantytowns, touches of “civilised society” and run-down town-steads left behind as the Old West withers and expires in the baking sun. Everything feels displaced and unsettled, save for the wide expanses of wild nature.

I think it’s accurate to say that this game was a gamble. This is not the fast, loud and violent action of Grand Theft Auto. Shootouts and setpieces are in abundance, but the world-building is decidedly more melancholic and honest. It’s a really sad game, but undeniably beautiful. Not content to be a scathing assault on capitalism and authoritarianism, it is far more of a meditation on the themes that every good Western has: Revenge, fate, the past and the future. Despite all of its praise, I don’t know if it’s ever truly gotten the flowers it’s due.

In MacFarlane’s Ranch, there’s a backroom behind Marston’s tiny lodgings, a small room where a poker game is continuously held. At night, when the dusty farmland is silent and unmoving, the bleeding orb of light emanating from the gas lantern hung up outside the room is a tempting invite. It’s easy to be John Marston, to head into the little backroom and play poker with strangers into the wee hours, collecting your winnings (or, more likely, lamenting your empty pockets) and heading back onto the ranch, as the shy rays of morning light illuminate the land.

A short horse ride over the rolling hills and arid flats of West Elizabeth later, and we’re in Armadillo.

Armadillo is not MacFarlane’s ranch. A lively boomtown that represents one of the last bastions of the Old World, it is hard to find a space in Armadillo where you cannot hear the saloon’s piano or the chattering of drunk patrons as they stumble out of its doors and down its stairs. Even without Red Dead Redemption 2’s retconning of Armadillo as a town that has recently emerged from a cataclysmic cholera outbreak, the town breathes history. It is economically depressed, teetering on the edge of lawlessness, and stuck in the past. If not for the unassuming train station connecting this relic with the rest of America, it would seem Armadillo is frozen in both time and space, spinning its wheels in the mud of quiet rebellion.

Like most of Red Dead Redemption, this town is sparse, violent and on the verge of something else. Ask any of the characters in the game, and they’ll tell you what that something is: society. It’s a common theme across the two games, the unbridled animal nature of the land and its people being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 20th Century.

Far away, up North, lies Blackwater. Even as a child, Blackwater always made me feel weird. It is easily the most identifiable space in the game, a modern town in virtually every way. Opulent government buildings sit at the end of a well-maintained street, with grand shop fronts standing in parallel with a modern, calm and quiet saloon. There is no small, wooden home for Marston to call his own, the only avaliable property being a furnished room at a hotel. There are signs of construction, expansion, and progress.

Police here are not scruffy would-be cowboys with bronze stars. They are uniformed, and adorned with modern weaponry. On a mechanical level, their AI is smarter, aggressive and ruthless to a fault. Even passively, their increased numbers are felt even in law-abiding strolls down the sidewalks and along the boardwalk.

Blackwater’s presentation is stark. The warm, natural, untamed tones of the rest of West Elizabeth are not present here. Blackwater is oppressively grey. It is clean, modern, safe and soulless. In a game marked by wild, chaotic violence, it feels very much like nothing can go wrong here. And it’s not nice.

In Blackwater, there is a hotel at the very end of the main strip. Up a flight of carpeted stairs and behind a unique glossy door, there is a poker game. The chairs around this perfectly maintained table are cushioned and plush, the height of opulence. This game is barred from public entry, where only the “Gentlemen’s Attire” will grant admission to the high-stakes game, amongst law enforcement and aristocracy. It is always eerily quiet, and without a single word spoken, you never once feel like you belong in this room, in this town.

The central message of Red Dead Redemption can be told across its immaculately composed twenty-hour narrative, and it can be told in tiny, unassuming moments like this. The free-for-all poker games that litter the ranch outhouses and saloon backrooms, and the high-stake affairs that bar entry to those who will not conform to polite society.

The old ways are done, and the war is won. The railroads have connected virtually every corner of the continent. The frontier is gone. The natives are gone. Almost every American state has joined the Union. The stagecoaches rattle along the dirt roads as normal, the fear of masked outlaws tempered and forgotten. The automobile has arrived, the cities have expanded and the guns are holstered.

But what does that mean for us? Not us, the grizzled middle-aged has-been outlaw with a pistol on our hip and a faithful nag at our beck and call, outrunning the end of the world, but us, the audience?

Red Dead Redemption was released in the middle of 2010. By this time, the brakes on the “open-world everything” train had begun to detach (in no small part due to Rockstar’s own impact). We were four years into the seventh console generation, with the then-mythological “eighth-gen” fast approaching.

In 2007, a year after the PS3’s launch, the best-selling games of the year included Super Mario Galaxy, Halo 3, BioShock and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. These games are all undoubtedly important in their own right, but they were all also something else: linear.

In video games, a linear title takes place in traditional levels, with success unlocking the next. You complete Level 1, you get to complete Level 2, and then Level 3, and so on until a (usually) fixed conclusion ends the experience.

Red Dead Redemption, an open-world title, invites exploration within a sandbox. Virtually every area is free to be examined, prodded, and discovered through the player’s unguided interactions. There are still traditional missions to spur on a pre-determined narrative, but you will miss most of what makes these games work if you bounce from mission marker to mission marker in a straight, uninterrupted line.

These sales trends would continue, but there came a point in 2012/13, when we started to see titles like Far Cry 3, Grand Theft Auto V, The Witcher 3, The Elder Scrolls V and Assassin’s Creed 3 creep onto year-end bestsellers lists. It represents a transformative change, one which the gaming industry still happily perpetuates for an audience that appears to be increasingly disenfranchised.

Open-world everything: The idea that every game has become open-world by necessity rather than design. How does a linear, tightly structured crime game like Mafia 2 compete in a world where I can load up Grand Theft Auto IV or V and do virtually everything I can do in that game, but wherever I like, whenever I like?

There’s a growing feeling that the mainstream gaming space is too safe. Long gone are the days when a major outfit like Ubisoft would take a punt on a psuedo-historical action-adventure game set in the Middle East in the midst of the Third Crusade, or where Rockstar Games would morph the easy, loud, action of Grand Theft Auto into a slow and sad reflection on the never-ending industrialisation of the western world.

Perhaps, from this lens, Red Dead Redemption was more prescient than we realised, maybe even more than it was meant to be. Rockstar is not innocent in the proliferation of this medium: Grand Theft Auto has been the open world by which all others are measured since 2004. But that’s rather the point. When Blackwater is so safe, why would you ever take the dirt road headed West?

Browse any gaming forum or online conversation concerned with grumblings over the most recent open-world release and you’ll see the same general idea being posited: No one does them like Rockstar.

The company has built a deserved reputation for creating the most vibrant, believable, organic open worlds on the market. Their video games are the most expensive and the most profitable products on the market.

Red Dead Redemption, with its hopeless and haunting depiction of an archaic and forgotten world being slowly squashed under the boot of progression is, for my money, the best example of an open world done right.

This space does not exist simply to look pretty or to provide a sense of scale.

The abandoned remains of Tumbleweed. The sterile, orderly streets of Blackwater. The simple, honest, oasis of MacFarlane’s ranch. The lawless backwater hellhole of Thieves Landing. The wild, untamed beauty of the Great Plains. The warm comfort of Beecher’s Hope.

Red Dead Redemption tells a story not just through its characters and narrative, but through the land itself. It serves as a warning, not just a warning of adapting to change, but of change itself.

It comes for everything, but from the bureaucratic evil of a heartless and uncaring government to the self-serving grandiosity of the Dutch Van der Linde’s of the world, that change is always human of some flavour or another. A compromise may exist, or it may not, but change is coming. How we engage with it, is entirely up to us.

We are built and raised for the world we find ourselves in. Many among us strive to look back at the end of our lives at a world that is better than the one we were given.

But what does that “better” world look like for those who thrived in what we had? Are they wrong? Is their lack of adaptation a failure? Change is often accepted as a good thing but when, if ever, does that stop being true?

If you can, make some time to exist in the world of Red Dead Redemption. I do mean “exist”, too. Walk along its roads, and observe its people. Ask yourself these questions. See the world through not just the eyes of John Marston, but through those characters who are pieces of his puzzle, and through your own.

And, if nothing else, spend time on the plains of West Elizabeth and drink in these small pockets of nature. Remember a time when change came to your front door.

Chaos theory, as applied to deterministic situations, is the principle that any slight change in the starting conditions can cause incredibly large changes in the system's state further down the line.

The video 1000 Chaotic Balls is a microcosm of this theory. The balls are positioned so closely together at their origin point that they appear as a single sphere. When they begin to bounce, wildly different patterns are produced. They are actually placed in ever so slightly different positions, with imperceivable degrees of separation. It takes less than half a minute for this system to become visually incomprehensible.

The idea of The Butterfly Effect is a subset of chaos theory that has made its way into popular culture. The idea that the delicate flapping of a butterfly’s wings could influence the formation of a devasting tornado many weeks later is one that easily lends itself to endless contemplation on ideas like fate and free will.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory does not choose this name simply for aesthetic ideals or for its surface-level integration into the game’s narrative. Rather, it is emblematic of how the game will be played and understood. Each level is a system that behaves in entirely predictable ways, save for the player. You can rely on the fact that any specific action you take will cause the same outcomes repeatedly. Those actions, and your agency in their deployment, are the element of chaos.

In Chaos Theory, every decision made, every bullet fired and every gadget deployed is the flapping of a butterfly’s wings. And a decision made at the beginning of any level can quickly become a tornado.

Part One - Superspy 101

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is a stealth game released in 2005. Unlike more contemporary titles like the Dishonoured franchise or the 2014 Thief reboot, Chaos Theory is a stealth title through and through. Sam Fisher, the protagonist of the game and series, always has at least two firearms at his disposal, though flagrant and aggressive use of these is a tactic that the game is eager to dissuade as quickly as possible. In fact, despite my five complete playthroughs of the game, I cannot think of a single occasion in which I used the automatic rifle to dispatch enemies, aside from the very first.

The first time I attempted to use my automatic rifle to dispatch two enemies, I killed the first one immediately. The second one returned fire, firing wildly into the darkness as I placed another accurate shot. In almost all action games and many quasi-stealth games, this would be fine, even correct. The enemies in the next room would not hear this scuffle, and I would be free to proceed.

Five other enemies heard the gunshots and came rushing to the location, and even in the darkness, I was immediately spotted. A very short gunfight later, and four remained while I lay dying.

I tried again, this time dispatching one more soldier before dying. Repeat. Three men are still standing. One more try and finally, I was through. The next room presented the same core conundrum, recontextualised. After two failures to clear this room, I stopped and closed the game for eight months, assuming (with no hint of ego) that the lauded masterpiece was actually rubbish and that I was the only one who could see through it.

The first lesson is simple and applies to every encounter in Chaos Theory. Sam Fisher is an expert at many things, and he can approach situations in whatever way you desire, but he is not a Call of Duty protagonist. He will be shot a handful of times before dying. There is no health regeneration mechanic, and traditional health packs are few and far between. His skill set is vast: His firearms are a failsafe.

Take a look at the above image, the game’s HUD. The top scale displays how well-lit your current location is. The left is total darkness. Nothing and no one can see you, and enemies can come shockingly close without discovery. On the right, you’re a coal miner in a country club. The rectangle dynamically updates, giving you tangible and reliable information to help you obscure your position.

The meter below that is the sound, not just of Fisher’s movement, but the outlined square is the ambient sound of the environment. In a shootout, this rectangle will be stuck to the right side of the screen. Here, in Lighthouse’s cave with its cavernous echo and the chit-chat between soldiers, a decent amount of audible cover is provided.

The HUD provides a level of clarity and tangibility that is almost entirely lost in modern titles. Not only does it ground you in each mission, making them feel like genuine and dynamic environments that move and change independent of your actions and agency, but it gives the player an immense sense of empowerment while removing so much of the messy and unreliable guesswork that other stealth titles (even other titles in this series) drown the player in. Splinter Cell: Conviction’s binary “hidden or visible” system comes to mind as the exact opposite kind of stealth, and it does not evoke fond memories for me, or indeed any Splinter Cell fan.

Chaos theory does not like it when you act like Superman. The enemies are almost hive-minded: When one spots you, almost everyone in his vicinity knows where you are. It is easy to shake them if you’re familiar with the level layout and enemy placement, but when you don’t, you are usually found and eliminated. Ammo is rare, very rare, usually tucked away in obscure corners. On the hardest (best) difficulties, one or two shots are guaranteed death.

These problems are extremely irritating, but are easily remedied: Don’t get caught.

“Splinter Cell” is a designation given to specially trained agents. The game self-describes them as “a sliver of glass… small, sharp, and nearly invisible”. This quote is crucial to understanding what Chaos Theory demands of its player.

If you have to fire your gun, no you don’t.

If you have chosen to fire your gun, you’ve already made a mistake.

It is entirely possible (and I would argue that at some stage it becomes essential) to complete Chaos Theory in its entirety without interacting, directly or indirectly, with a single non-essential character.

There is seldom a more satisfying and powerful experience in gaming than to turn back around to a complex full of armed soldiers, camera-filled hallways, locked doors and alarmed sectors and say “They never knew I was here”.

Urgh, fine. Eight months later. Install, and we’re back.

Part Two - Trial And Error

Chaos Theory’s first level, “Lighthouse”, is a carefully constructed introduction. Each section of the level has no more than a handful of enemies, and plenty of space to work with. Unlike many of its later stages, which take place in well-lit and overpopulated concrete structures, Lighthouse is set in the dead of night and mostly in a pitch-black cave system turned military camp.

Enter the cave, and you can interrogate an enemy at knifepoint for immediate clarity on where to go and what to do. This isn’t essential, as Lighthouse is intentionally designed to be completely interconnected. Wait, and like a real soldier on patrol, he’ll move elsewhere. He won’t stand with his back to the only entrance like a placed goon who must be removed from the equation forever.

Lighthouse quickly introduces the secondary objective mechanic, which takes the form of “tagging” various weapons crates around the level. These crates are easy to find and require very little backtracking, though any and all backtracking is entirely possible given the aforementioned interconnectivity. You can either interrogate another guard to be tipped off about these crates or simply stumble across one, which is guaranteed to happen given that at least one is placed in a room that you must traverse through.

Later on, tighter spaces are introduced with various enemies. One room sees you sneaking past two enemies, one sitting and one sleeping. You can kill one or both if you wish: The sleeping man is not woken by a silenced shot or a quick throat slitting, and they are facing away from both the entrance and exit. But the lack of any reason, any incentive to kill is another lesson. Chaos Theory takes the killing of enemies, a given and an expectation in most stealth/action titles, and asks you to decide if you really need to. And once you’ve left an enemy in blissful ignorance in Chaos Theory, you’ll never stop trying to find ways to spare as many lives as possible.

The catharsis of killing, the main entertainment value of shooters and action games, has been replaced. The power trip from taking artificial lives has been replaced with another feeling, the act of mercy. Here, the chaos theory is in full effect. Let’s assume that in the next room, you are detected and need to retreat. Once an unsilenced shot is fired, either by you or a hostile, the sat and sleeping enemies will wake up and join the assault. If you killed both men, then this is a moot point. If you didn’t, then one or two additional armed hostiles in a game that harshly punishes open conflict mean that his room is no longer a potential hiding place, but the exact opposite, turned from a safe haven to a death trap.

This may feel like an unnecessarily grandiose point: Don’t all video games present choices of which the player then deals with the consequences? And yes, while this is true, it’s never more true than it is in Chaos Theory.

Load up whatever Call of Duty is the most recent. See how far you can get without firing a bullet. Not very far, right? Jump onto Grand Theft Auto, and see how long you can go without committing a crime; a similar experience. Chaos Theory’s brilliance is that every level can remain a still lake or a deafening warzone, and anywhere in between. Everyone can live or everyone can die. It can be loud and violent or it can be as quiet as the grave, and none of these possible pairings is mutually exclusive.

Call of Duty is an action game that forces your hand: Chaos Theory is a stealth game that arms you with everything you need to become a walking shadow, but you can really do anything. If you want to flood every room with grenades and smoke and empty scores of bullets into every soldier, you can certainly do that. But be prepared that Chaos Theory has consequences in abundance for every action.

Lighthouse’s genius comes from its malleability. It feels designed to be played in two major ways; separate and quietly eliminate the enemy forces, or use the abundance of shadows and space to sneak past totally undetected. It’s a level I generally skip when revisiting Chaos Theory, as it feels a touch too linear after so many playthroughs.

This isn’t to suggest it’s too simple to be enjoyed on repeat playthroughs but is instead a testament to its purpose as a sandbox of sorts. It is an opportunity to take control of Sam Fisher, to learn his abilities and toolkit, to experiment with its impacts on the enemies and to make mistakes and, crucially, to carry these lessons into the rest of the game.

So let’s take these lessons to the greatest level in stealth gaming history.

Part Three - Positively Do Not Blow The Bloody Doors Off

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory’s third level “Bank”, is legendary amongst stealth game fanatics. It combines a labyrinthian design with sparse but careful enemy placement while providing multiple divergent paths into every major area. A perfect “Ghost” run is not easy, requiring a degree of field recon to digest each room's dangers and careful consideration of each action taken.

Unlike the second level, “Cargo Ship”, which follows a more linear route designed to test the environmental perception skills that “Lighthouse” taught you, “Bank” is far more open-ended.

Backtracking is essential to complete your primary and secondary objectives. As such, your decisions carry even more weight than they have done in previous levels; their consequences cannot be outrun or hidden. A startled enemy you successfully distracted and slipped past may prove a tremendous problem when you later return and find him patrolling on high alert. Certain secondary objectives are hidden in areas of the bank that are incredibly easy to miss, and often only have a single entry and exit point, forcing the player to remember where enemies are placed, where you’ve already been and where you haven’t: It all allows “Bank” to feel like an organic and believable labyrinth.

“Bank” opens with a section just outside the front doors populated with soldiers. The area is in relative darkness, but a new lesson is taught immediately. Moving forward at a decent pace won’t be audible, but it will turn on motion-sensing lights, lighting Fisher up like a Christmas tree. Even if you survive this encounter, the bank is now on high alert and Fisher is likely badly injured.

Interrogating any solider at this beginning stage will inform the player of the motion sensor lights, but Chaos Theory’s trial and error approach is implemented fantastically here. You can simply sneak slower to avoid turning these motion lights on, and veteran players have even routed a specific lane where a speed that matches ambient sound levels but avoids a single motion detection zone can be achieved, avoiding all detection without moving at a snail’s pace. Chaos Theory is steadfast in its rewards for exploration and optimisation, and it’s one of the main reasons the game is so loved: With enough skill, you can actually have your cake and eat it.

Rappeling into the bank from the central skylight presents the player with a laser grid, trapping them in the security room. You can use Fisher’s EMP pistol attachment to disable any specific laser and manoeuvre through it, you can hack a nearby computer to disable the grid, you can jump over the first laser if you’re exceptionally risky and enjoy making things difficult, or you can walk right through it, sound the alarm and begin the massacre.

None of this is explained to you. Fisher doesn’t communicate he’s trapped by a laser grid to his support team, and nobody will suggest any of these solutions to you. Sam’s EMF vision will reveal the origin points of the laser grid, allowing for your EMP to be placed accurately, but other than that, it’s largely a puzzle with multiple solutions. It’s an excellent way to exemplify the feeling of a bank robbery, but it teaches you immediately that “Bank” will be full of traps and puzzles stopping you from completing objectives and making progress.

Not a single one of these puzzles has an inherent time limit, but your own actions may force an organic one upon you. Hacking (as seen above) has a “time” bar above your isolated row of numbers, but backing out of the minigame incurs no penalty and resets your progress. However, hacking a keypad carries the inherent risk of human error, where an incorrect input will result in a level-wide alarm. That pressure is tenfold when the enemy is already bearing down on you, and safely backing out and trying again isn’t a viable option.

“Bank” is about control, the maintenance of which allows for calm and measured progress. It can quickly spiral out of control, but it never feels like a coin toss or pure chance. If you played every level in Chaos Theory ten times over before playing “Bank” once, you’d likely still encounter issues and roadblocks. It proves the central thesis of this essay, that Chaos Theory’s greatest success is its predictability. Almost every scenario can be mapped out and accounted for, and experience is king.

Part Four - Where Did I Go Wrong?

Today, Sam Fisher and the Splinter Cell franchise has gone more than a decade without a standalone title, instead becoming something of a sideshow attraction in Ubisoft’s seemingly endless pantheon of fallen titans.

It is an unavoidable truth that pure stealth titles have fallen out of fashion in the last few console generations. Today, perhaps only the Hitman titles are still flying the flag for the genre, albeit with significant concessions to the action crowd. Those games are, first and foremost, assassination simulators, giving players the opportunity to carry out specific murders in as clinical a fashion as possible, a far cry from Splinter Cell’s ruthlessly passivist ethos. There is an emphasis on minimising collateral damage and prioritising efficiency and covertness, but the entire point of each mission is that someone must die, and that is decidedly not Splinter Cell.

Ubisoft’s attempts to revitalise the genre have been few and far between. 2010’s Splinter Cell: Conviction bent the knee entirely to the high-octane action craze of the time, resembling a third-person Call of Duty clone, Splinter Cell in name only. 2013’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist was something of an unholy marrying of old and new, resulting in a fun if confused title, kneecapping itself by refusing to commit to a cohesive vision.

Today, titans of the genre like Splinter Cell and Thief are dormant and likely dead. While Ubisoft has announced a full-scale remake of the original Splinter Cell, information is scarce and the finished project is likely years away, still in pre-production. The commercial value of a hardcore stealth title in 2023 seems a tenuous one, and while many fans (myself included) are excited to hear more about this remake and what it means for the future of the franchise, a glossy action title that simply apes the most visually recognisable elements of the original game while totally changing the formula is absolutely not an unreasonable expectation from a studio that seems hell-bent on squeezing every last penny from each of its releases.

The long-standing Assassin’s Creed title, another heavyweight on Ubisoft’s roster, has also announced Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, a popular yet somewhat bizarre proposition. With the series veering toward a full-scale RPG powerhouse, Mirage is an attempt to recapture the audience that still reminisces about the lone assassins who used to scale the towers of Florence and the cathedrals of Jeruselum, by returning to a formula that has been abandoned since at least 2016: a narrative-focused action title with cohesive linearity, albeit in an open-world environment, though one that pales in comparison to the ones we see today.

It remains to be seen how successful this is, both in terms of audience excitement and commercial engagement, and more crucially whether this concept can work in the gaming landscape of 2023. When the original Assassin’s Creed title was released in 2007, single-player action titles were the flavour of the month and Grand Theft Auto IV had only just been scheduled for release. In 2023, when Grand Theft Auto VI reportedly has an internal budget of a billion dollars before marketing and a development cycle now approaching a decade long, how viable can a formula from the late noughties be, in a world where games are measured by their dollar-per-hour value and internal map calculations?

Splinter Cell doesn’t have the open-world option. It is intrinsically a linear concept, one that requires careful design and balancing of a single-player experience that doesn’t lend itself to the microtransaction-laden modern Ubisoft formula that has utterly infested its entirely contemporary library.

In truth, I have little hope that Ubisoft will deliver a classic Splinter Cell experience again. But it’s hard to worry about the future of the series when Chaos Theory, nearly 20 years later, stands the test of time. The industry has moved on, and a world where Travis Scott hosts virtual concert experiences in a free-to-play cartoon-styled battle royale, the biggest game on the face of the planet, is not one where a commercial titan like Ubisoft is willing to take chances on patient, measured linear stealth titles when billion dollar properties like Assassin’s Creed can be effectively reskinned for three or four years on the trot before a vague PR statement loosely commits to change.

Chaos Theory may not have been Ubisoft’s Fortnite or Call of Duty, but it stands head and shoulders above its contemporaries and successors, an overlooked masterpiece that could have taught the industry so many important lessons about what video games can do that no other medium can. A shining example that stands against the tide of titles that attempt to blur the line between cinema and interactive entertainment, giving nothing but unrestricted and total control over your actions and influence. There are no unskippable cutscenes, no fragments of open gameplay sandwiched between scripted moments.

It is pure agency, the ability to decide who lives and who dies, who knows and who doesn’t. Chaos Theory takes the concept of a video game and realises it to the best of its ability.

Here’s the world, now take it.