Premiere: Alexei Shishkin – “Disco Elysium”

Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff

Alexei Shishkin keeps busy. After taking the first half of the year off, he’s back now with a new single, “Disco Elysium,” out tomorrow, and a new album on the way. Good Times is Shishkin’s eleventh full-length and first of 2025–after putting out two LPs and an EP in 2024–and it releases in September. Ordinarily you’d need to wait to hear the record’s opening track, but it’s your lucky day: we’ve got an exclusive premiere of “Disco Elysium” a day early. It’s a blown-out lo-fi slowcore track, and it manages to fit a lot into less than two minutes. 

Shishkin shares that

This song was inspired by the game Disco Elysium, which is maybe the greatest video game ever made. You’re a degenerate, amnesiac detective coming off a crazy bender, and you’re trying to solve a murder that happened in a small post-revolution town. The game covers everything from psychology to politics to lost love to life, death, and introspection. It’s honestly one of the most well-written, exciting things I’ve ever experienced. I play through it every two or three years, and I just so happened to be playing it when we recorded this song, so I wrote about it. Shout out to Robert Kurvitz who wrote most of that game. (Oh, and PS: in that game, there are four distinct sounds that play representing Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motor Skills–as an homage, we run through those samples as part of the first four bars of this song).

Check out “Disco Elysium” below.

Good Times is out September 5th.


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Zac Djamoos | @gr8whitebison


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