THE SiGNAL CYCLE
If one is meant to discover it, one discovers the pattern in their own time.
The Making Of
Fresh off the release and initial reception for the How Can I Lose What I Never Had? EP, Waters assembled a few collaborators and entered the studio looking to produce the band's debut full-length album.
This was not the first such endeavor that he had undertaken, as over five years prior, Waters served as the primary songwriter and guitarist for a Viking metal outfit called Winterblade. And in later explanations of the completed work, Waters noted other similarities between the two:
"The whole record, as I see it," he explained in summer 2026, "is a modern retelling of an Old Norse/Icelandic legendary tale, called Volsunga Saga. Each character, from the intrepid and doomed hero Sigurd, to his dangerous and oblivious partner Brynhild, who's a Valkyrie, are represented in new people. This doesn't make the modern people less complicit in how they behave. It just explains them."
Another interview linked the theme with the theory of "archetypes" pioneered by Carl Jung, in which people share a collective memory without realizing how much sway it has on their actions.
Waters, who has since done a live-reading performance of Volsunga Saga twice, emphasized that his "Brynhild" character is, in fact, divided up among multiple people, and points to the record's lead single, "Revolving Door," as a case study in how the same archetype can appear in multiple people.