AlunaGeorge did a show inside Minecraft - we’re living in The Future, people

Last week, AlunaGeorge took to your cousin’s favourite digital Lego simulator Minecraft for the world’s first performance inside a video game. How very 2016.

The unofficial show was a like-for-like recreation of the pair’s performance at Norway’s The Gathering tech festival, which saw a team of poor sods lumbered with the task of replicating their every on-stage move via Minecraft avatars.It might all sound ‘a bit Matrix’, but if you think about it, this could be The Actual Future. Maybe. Below we get a head-start on those who might be invading your under-telly thumb exercisers in the coming months.We went in the studio with AlunaGeorge recently to chat all things album two - catch up with that here.

It’s no secret that Father John Misty’s a fan of “free 3D virtual world where users can socialize, connect and create using free voice and text chat” (snooze) Second Life. He dedicated his entire Instagram feed to it for months, telling DIY last year that it soon started to leak into his IRL existence. “I started finding SecondLife photos that represented what I was actually doing,” he explained, “So if I was in London, I’d find a SecondLife photo of London. And then my friends who live there would be like, ‘oh, I saw that you’re in London!’” Bit creepy, really.Still, what better way to take Misty’s soaring sounds to the next level than showcasing them on a platform where he can, er, actually fly? ‘I Love You, Honeybear’ is a record packed full of moments where Josh Tillman feels like he’s about to lift off like a child’s poorly-guarded helium balloon - it’s only right that he should leave the stage vertically, really.

Speedy Ortiz figurehead Sadie Dupuis is no stranger to EA’s god simulator The Sims. She might spend her on-stage evenings offering barbed takes on the minutiae of life, but catch her back in the hotel afterwards and she’s bound to be overseeing a much broader kingdom. Back in April of last year, Sadie told DIY that despite her love of of playing Laptop God, she hadn’t yet made Sim versions of the band. But it can’t be far off, surely?

No-one on the scene is as wrapped up in video games as Kero Kero Bonito. Sampling all manner of Nintendo classics in their bonkers future-pop is surely just the start - as soon as they can hop right inside their beloved N64, they’re sure to bring that future-forward, sugar-rush pop back to the retro domain.

Button-bashers be damned - everyone knows the key to fighting game success is holing yourself up in your room, studying and memorising list after list of thumb-twisting combos and special moves. There’s no better soundtrack for such time-wasting than White Lung’s newest. ‘Hungry’, the first glimpse at their incoming , is a thousand rounds of Street Fighter distilled into one laser-targeted punk-rock lightening bolt. Like drinking fifty Red Bulls and entering a beat-em-up tournament on a whim, White Lung’s sucker punches come doused in blue flame - get them in the game itself and they’ll shoot straight to the top of the leaderboard.

‘Divine Simulacrum’, the centrepiece of Yeasayer’s ace incoming new album ‘Amen & Goodbye’, owes more to video games than its Zelda-soundtrack-aping use of niche woodwind. Named after a collectable object in fantasy role-player RuneScape, it’s an insight into their love of the magical and medieval. According to RuneScape Wiki (look, we’re not experts, alright?), Divine Simulacrum is “a divine location that can be created at level 75 Divination, using 100 elder energy, giving 16 Divination experience.” Nope, us neither.
A little more research suggests it’s something that offers players about a billion different types of energy - the likes of happy-clappy pop oddities ’Silly Me’ and ‘I Am Chemistry’ might not suggest Yeasayer are lacking in the stuff, but pack them full of Divination and lord only knows how amped up their live show could get.