As they get ready to tour its mournful music, the band reflect on Disco Elysium, the video game whose soundtrack won them a Bafta – and plenty of new followers

When Jan Scott Wilkinson, frontman of the band formerly known as British Sea Power, was first asked to work on a video game soundtrack, he was sceptical. “We didn’t know much about the game, but our manager Dave seemed to think there was something interesting about this Robert guy who had been pleasantly hounding him,” he says. That was Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, part of a team who had just started work on an esoteric video game about an alcoholic cop trying to solve a murder in an impoverished region of a war-torn country. The game was Disco Elysium, now regarded as one of the all-time great cerebral role-playing games: released in 2019, it sat atop PC Gamer’s top 100 list for four years in a row.

Kurvitz is a Sea Power superfan. Pick a random scene from the game and there’ll be something – a bit of dialogue, a location, a theme – that has some sort of Sea Power reference in it. Wilkinson tells me that Kurvitz was “captivating and full of a bubbling passion” and that he knew an unsettling number of “strange details about our music”. Kurvitz had already embedded some of those “very obscure” Sea Power references in the world of Disco Elysium before they had even met. Whether the band liked it or not, they were already enmeshed in this eccentric Estonian’s world.