In 2011, Warner Bros. and WaterTower Music put together a compilation album for Rocksteady’s open-world superhero game Batman: Arkham City. The album featured some pretty big names like Panic! at the Disco, Blaqk Audio, and Serj Tankian, all contributing original songs meant to pay tribute to the caped crusader. Among them was progressive rock band Coheed and Cambria, whose song “Deranged” was one of the promotional tracks for the record. Nowadays, the album has been removed from most streaming platforms, and you can only find remnants of it in fan-uploaded tracks on places like Spotify. But today, Coheed and Cambria re-released “Deranged,” and a small piece of Batman history is back on streaming services where the band can reap the benefits.
Coheed is re-releasing “Deranged” alongside a new song titled “The Joke.” According to the vinyl single’s store page, “The Joke” isn’t a song from the band’s upcoming album, but is more of a “bridge” between its most recent one, “Vaxis II: The Window of the Waking Mind,” and its next. The band says the single felt better paired with a re-release of “Deranged,” and given the song’s themes of making a “joke” of someone, the parallels are pretty apparent. The band even makes a pretty overt tribute to The Joker in the song’s music video, which features a Joker-like character plaguing the mind of Al the Killer, a character from the Amory Wars story told in the band’s albums.
Admittedly, “Deranged” has never been my favorite Coheed song, but it’s good to see at least one song from the Batman: Arkham City album find its way back onto streaming services under Coheed’s label, where the band can make a few cents. “The Joke,” meanwhile, is so groovy that I already know I’m gonna have it on repeat all day. Zach Cooper killing it on the bass with this one.
The Batman: Arkham series hasn’t had a proper action game since 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight, but Camouflaj is making a new VR game set in the universe called Batman: Arkham Shadow, which will be coming to Meta Quest 3 later this year. There’s also Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which, uh, your mileage may vary.
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