Let's get the elephant — or rather, the dragon — out of the room. Yes, the visual identity is cartoonish. Yes, "furry" and "phonk" are not words traditionally found in the same sentence as "serious musicianship." But strip away the mascot and what you're left with is a genuinely accomplished piece of sad, snarling electronic-metal songwriting that would not sound out of place soundtracking the final boss fight of a game you didn't know you needed to cry during.
"Rive" opens on a bed of melancholic synth, all minor-key shimmer and slow-burn tension, the kind of intro that suggests restraint before it absolutely does not deliver restraint. When the drums arrive — and they arrive with the subtlety of a wardrobe falling down a staircase — they bring with them a distorted guitar wall that owes as much to early-2000s nu-metal as it does to the cracked-concrete aesthetic of Memphis phonk. It's a combination that has no earthly business working as well as it does, yet here we are: fists in the air, mascara running, somehow.
What elevates "Rive" above novelty is the emotional throughline. This isn't pastiche for pastiche's sake — there's real ache buried in that low-end throb, a sense of something being torn (the title, one assumes, isn't accidental) that gives the track a gravity most instrumental phonk cuts simply don't bother reaching for. Mars understands that the best cinematic music tells a story without needing a single lyric to do it, and "Rive" tells its story in peaks and collapses, in the way the melody keeps trying to resolve and keeps refusing to let itself.
It's also, frankly, a triumph of production. The mix is dense without being cluttered — synths, distorted guitar, and trap-adjacent percussion all fighting for space and somehow finding room to breathe, which is no small feat when your palette spans three genres that were never designed to coexist. This is DIY bedroom production punching several weight classes above its station.
Where does "Rive" sit in the wider MARSUG universe? Sadder and more metal than the rock-cover cheek of "TMNT 2007 Rock Theme," heavier than the chill lean of "Furry Dragon Rock," it stakes out its own patch of scorched earth — proof that beneath the cartoon dragon suit is an artist restless enough to keep redrawing his own boundaries. For anyone soundtracking a trailer, a boss fight, or simply a very dramatic drive home, "Rive" delivers exactly the kind of over-the-top, genuinely felt catharsis that the best British critics have always been suckers for. Recommended, unreservedly, dragon and all.