What I see at the heart of Drones is a kind of emotional wish fulfillment. Not in a negative way though. Well delivered wish fulfillment might be some of the most powerful storytelling out there.

All band members have talked a lot about how they wanted to return to their roots or how they wanted to get more raw when this album was in the works. The only time when that actually seemed to be the case was when Psycho was the only single out. After that Dead Inside and Mercy came out, which both sounds like Black Holes songs. When they say that they want to get back to their roots they really just seem to mean "before The Resistance" which was by no means the first time they experimented with the big scary oogie-boogie man we today know as pop elements. Just remember, Take a Bow had a stereotypical electronic build and bass drop.

But the statements about getting back to their roots and getting more raw might still be onto something. What basically the whole fan-base has noticed at this point is how straight forward the lyrics are across all of Drones. That in and of itself points to the core of the album. The story is not an excuse for those lyrics to be as literal as they are and to think that they need to excused is to miss the point. They would work the exact same way if the story wasn't there. The difference between Matt's earlier work and these lyrics is the difference between though-provoking drama and simple tearjerking.

That is mostly what I talk about when I call Drones emotional wish fulfillment. That and the arc that starts after The Handler and keeps going up until The Globalist. It's about a character that breaks away from society and becomes his own by fighting authority. After that he finally gets a girl, like the one he lost in the beginning of the album. Bound together, now and forever. It's melodramatic shortly put. The best way to enjoy it is really just to strap in and sing along for the ride, without thinking much about. Not because it's a stupid album, but because the literal interpretation is done after the first session with it.

It takes a very certain type of mindset in order to understand what I'm talking about here, one that is really hard to put yourself in since it's a very subjective one and because of that the listener might never understand it. But this has for now been my incoherent clusterfuck of a rambling about why I think Drones is a pretty decent album. Hope it helped in some way.