Internet sports simulator Blaseball is many things. A robust fantasy baseball league, a crowdsourced piece of existential horror, beloved home of the Baltimore Crabs (claws up!). But a banging audio experience it is decisively not—at least, not until the official soundtrack to a silent browser game drops later this year.
Discipline, an album of songs themed after the game's tumultuous first "era", comes courtesy of The Garages, a "queer anarcho-syndicalist musical collective" founded by fans of the Seattle Garages Blaseball team. Less a band and more a label representing dozens of musicians (some amateur, some pro), The Garages has a staggering back-catalogue of bangers themed after the bizarre world of The Game Band's eldritch sports league.
Picking them up for Blaseball's first official soundtrack is a no-brainer. After all, that game has always been held up by a phenomenal collaboration between fans and devs.
There's an incredible, manic energy to The Garages, caught perfectly in the band's takeover of the Blaseball Twitch channel this weekend. The ensemble lends the absurdist baseball league such a raw, violent punk-rock voice that it's hard not to get swept up in it all. I might not know a thing about Jessica Telephone's batting averages, but I'll be damned if the heartfelt agony of Dial Tone didn't punch me in the gut.
Discipline will be available as a double-sided vinyl over on iam8bit, with pre-orders expected to ship in the latter half of this year. Folks without record players will be able to listen to it via Bandcamp when the album launches in May.
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