ARTWORK / A-THRICECitizen of Empire: Afterlives
The empire is officially over. Its systems are not.
Borders, ports, museums and software: a fuller map of what survives an empire and what migration makes from it.
Why this album exists.
Afterlives expands the first Citizen of Empire project into a panoramic investigation of imperial inheritance. The record moves between the personal, the domestic and the infrastructural: passports and trade routes, museum display cases, the punishment economy, household language, diaspora memory, code and the many cultures now sharing London. It ultimately asks what might replace empire—and suggests that shared culture is already writing different answers.
The original album began with a person being misread. This record asks what built the categories in the first place, how those systems persist and what people can build beyond them.
NARRATIVE ARCMisfiled citizen → imperial diagnosis → inherited home → institutional power → adaptation and rewrite.
Track by track.
Main album sequence drawn from the A-Thrice concept and discography documents. Bonus tracks are identified separately.
14 CORE TRACKS + 2 SUPPLEMENTARY- 013 Migrations Deep
- 02A Tribe Called 44
- 03British Asian Standard Time
- 04What Tribe?
- 05Protectorate Flow
- 06Punished Into Profit
- 07Mother Tongue in a Minor Key
- 08Empire Calendar
- 09H-1B-Sides
- 10Glass Case Alibi
- 11Commonwealth of Confusion
- 12Reply All
- 13Night Sari Engine
- 14Empire Architecture
- Bonus / supplementary tracks
- +Lemniscate of Audacity
- +Made in London
Listen first.
Then follow the footnotes.
Find A-Thrice across streaming platforms. SoundCloud and Bandcamp are used for soft releases before wider distribution; availability varies by album.
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Explore the books, institutional records and research trails related to the record. Context and interpretations are distinguished from definitive historical claims.
Explore the research index ↗Read annotated lyrics on Genius ↗