My Inspiration: Pearly Gates – CURATED

Pearly Gates, the electronic solo project of Newcastle’s Tom Hunt, drops CURATED, a track about emotional disconnection and how our carefully managed lives blur the line between reality and performance. Musically, melodious vocals sit smoothly over peppy beats and haunting, organ-esque synths before soaring into an impassioned, questioning chorus. The track’s euphoria occasionally gives way to an unsettling atmosphere, driven by ominous bass, scattered vocal echoes and glitches, and shifting sonic textures. It’s an enjoyable listen with plenty of depth for those who want a little bit more.

Here, Tom tells us more about what inspired the track…

One evening in April, I watched Adam Curtis’ documentary, HyperNormalisation, and it really stuck with me. The whole idea of being surrounded by so much information and so many manufactured versions of reality, to the point where you almost stop questioning any of it, really resonated with me. It made me think about how modern life in the digital age feels slightly unreal, and how we’ve all just become accustomed to it. That was really where CURATED started, and it ended up being the song that opened up a lot of the ideas I explored across the rest of the new material I’ve been working on. 

The heart of the song stemmed from feeling increasingly flattened by digital life as I’ve become older. Recently I have felt overexposed to everything but somehow disconnected from it all, there’s just so much to take in all the time, and I think you eventually become numb to it. I think that modern life is feeling increasingly temporary and performative, in the ways people use irony as a coping mechanism, or relationships as an aesthetic, and the way we perform self-awareness at the expense of actually being vulnerable, the line between reality and performance is becoming gradually harder to distinguish. That’s where the line ‘even my small talk is AI generated’ came from. It’s obviously quite a satirical line, but there’s something quite bleak underneath it. I wasn’t trying to make an anti-technology song, it’s more about the feeling of becoming emotionally automated, everything is so curated now that, for example, I’ve been questioning how much of personality is actually genuine and authentically me. 

Lyrically, this song felt like a turning point for me, earlier Pearly Gates songs romanticised modern chaos, whereas CURATED stares directly at it. It’s slightly self-aware and slightly cynical, but I didn’t want it to feel too hopeless, I like the idea of being able to dance through existential crises. I wanted the sonic elements of the song to reflect this contradiction, euphoric in the moment but bleak underneath, like something you can dance to while simultaneously questioning your every life decision, I think that tension is really the key element of the song.