RAZ – ‘Ballad for the CCTV Age’
Some roads don’t end. They just get wired.
While half the industry’s still busy making glossy trap bangers about flexing and filters, The RAZ has dropped something that actually smells like tarmac, rain, and bad decisions at 2am.
“Ballad for the CCTV Age” is pure outlaw scripture for the surveillance state. It’s part UK drill grit, part narcocorrido storytelling – three girls in a stolen Astra tearing down the M1 in 2004, boot full of debt and cheap smoke, with the whole cursed country dissolving in the rear-view. Fast-forward twenty-two winters and the same voice is broadcasting from a hidden booth, still spinning dead junglist tapes, still hearing ghosts in the signal. This isn’t nostalgia. This is testimony.
The Run
Verse 1 hits cold and narrative: grey Sheffield skies like a blade, service-station coffee tasting of burnt wires, payphone prophets warning not to cross the river. Blue lights blooming in the mirror. That line “if they stop us, love, don’t say my name” followed by cranking the pirate radio louder? That’s proper lived-in detail. No glamour, just three girls trying to outrun their own postcode while the island watches.
The chorus is massive – melodic, haunting, built to stick in your head like a wanted poster: “We were ballads for the CCTV age / Names in the static, trapped inside the cage…” You can feel the motorway ghosts leaning under the streetlights. The whole country wired like a paranoid shrine. Cameras remember everything. Proper drill storytelling meets that old-school corrido fatalism: you can run coast to coast but the road knows, the cameras know, the motorways definitely know.
2026 Transmission
Verse 2 flips to the older, battle-hardened RAZ voice. Towers glowing red where mills used to stand. ⧖ symbols scratched in fluorescent lines. GEFFINE ghosts riding the fibre rain. Burner phones, dead drops in abandoned retail parks, kids with constellation marks. It’s classic FAEWAVE – that urban-mystic, signal-hijacking sorcery she’s been perfecting with Tengushee since the underground days. Pirate frequencies that never quite end. Walls that still bite.
The final chorus soars tragic and huge: burnt-out saints on an electronic stage, no angels left in the shopping precinct glow. Then that brutal closer – “You can leave this city, change your face, move postcodes… But the motorways know.”
Real Over Reel
This is what happens when a proper Xennial who was actually there in the stolen cars and the 3am transmissions writes about the CCTV cage. Not some plastic Gen Z “dystopia aesthetic” cosplay. RAZ has been dropping heat since the actual 90s, through the dormancy periods real artists take when they’re living the lyrics instead of just performing them. FAEWAVE isn’t trend-chasing – it’s the fracture line running through council estates, service stations, and pirate signals.
If you’re tired of music that feels like it was focus-grouped in a glass office, this one’s for you. Crank it loud on a long drive. Feel the static.
Full transmission and the rest of the catalogue at raz.cyberpunkonline.net Keep eyes on @geekngamercom
The cameras are always rolling. Drive careful tonight.