I suppose it’s high time I post a song by the band whose logo I’m using in my avatar. They aren’t my favourite band (though, they’re up there), I just really like the design and the colour.

I first heard The Sixth Lie in the anime series A Certain Scientific Accelerator to which they licensed their song Shadow is the Light and I love that song, but never thought to look up their other songs. I started looking at their other songs about two years ago, and liked what I heard, so I followed them (MusicHarbour, it’s an app that notifies you of new releases by artists you follow).

Somewhat on a tangent that I will connect back with momentarily, my wife bought a Nintendo Switch, and a game I’d only heard bad things about, Animal Crossing. I thought it was a dumbed down version of Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley for little kids. (I’m not saying it’s not, but that’s also rude and unfair.) My game was Breath of the Wild. I dropped Breath of the Wild for being too hard, and she dropped Animal Crossing because it didn’t engage her. Once I realised I could not advance the story as player 2, we agreed to start a new island with me as player one. But she never played it, so I started a third island with me as player one, and she never joined it. Sad face dot tif.

Anyway, after playing Animal Crossing for a couple months, having rolled the credits and gotten into the post-game content, The Sixth Lie released a new song. This one. And I thought, compared with the other songs they did, it sounded different. Playing Animal Crossing and listening to this song made a connection in my mind. Virtual Sky sounds like it’s sang by the Jack Russel terrier character, K.K. Slider, to some extent, and if you listen to the lyrics, it’s… kind of about Animal Crossing. He’s talking about bugs and living in a virtual world. It could be other things but it seemed pretty clear to me that there was some connection. Or maybe I was stretching. But it was cool to me!

About a month later, they released a second version of Virtual Sky, this time 100% in English. The first one is in both English and Japanese. Also, this time around, his vocals are a little clearer; he sounds less like the canine musician from the game.

Yes, I’ve asked K.K. Slider to play Virtual Sky. He won’t do it. (K.K. Slider visits your island every Saturday, and after 6pm local time, he will take requests, and you have to type the name of the song in, which means you have to know the names of his songs. You can also tell him your mood and he’ll pick one at random from that list. But there are a few he will never play unless you ask by name, and if you ask for those by name, he will call you out on being a cheater (he will say you have a code book). If he doesn’t know the song (you spelled it wrong or you made up something he doesn’t know), he just picks a random song. And whatever song he plays first each Saturday evening, he gives you a copy of that you can play on speakers or stereos or other sound-producing objects in the game.

But about the song: the single title implies it’s from an album called “Sounds From a Dreamt Future.” That caption appears on six singles released one a month for the first six months of 2025. But this album never came out, and here we are a year after the last one came out. You could collect the songs and their English versions, and the Japanese version as well of Wonderland (originally in Hindi) and have 11 songs, which makes an album, but it would be repetitive and it would not be a real album. Anyway, one or two of the songs are good. The rest are amazing. Virtual Sky isn’t even the best one; that would be Time Capsule, but I have far less to say about that one. Absolute masterpiece though.

Edit: Side note, addendum, tangent, whatever. I’ve since began cosplaying Tom Nook. I have the official shirt, I have raccoon ears, I have a decent tail (not a very lore accurate one, but it’s “close enough”), and I have a Bells bag my wife crocheted and filled with actual bells (so it rings when I shake it). I have an old Android phone I’ve slapped an Animal Crossing case on, and it runs Nova Launcher Prime with an Animal Crossing theme I put together, so basically I have a NookPhone (like in the game). And it has a playlist of my favourite Animal Crossing songs on it, so when I walk around, it’s playing Animal Crossing music. There’s also a whole bunch of “KK Slider cover” type songs on YouTube which are regular songs but tweaked to sound like KK Slider is performing them. I have some of those up there. And, of course, Virtual Sky is on that playlist.