Well, well, looks like we’ve got another song here that I have to thank the people of EA Sports for. They didn’t create it, obviously. It’s but another of the plenty tracks they thought were worthy of inclusion in one of their soundtracks. I’ve always wondered how that process goes down… Yet again, it’s the FIFA series that Seeed’s ‘Release’ was used, this time in the 2005 iteration of the game. Not 2004, no. Though it would have been 2004 when the game was released. That soundtrack didn’t disappoint either. Had a varied selection from The Streets, Flogging Molly, New Order, Morrissey, and many, many others. But it was this particular track, a
rousing dancehall number, that honestly came to be one of my favourite tracks ever to be used in a FIFA soundtrack.

When you hear the song for the first time, you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that the group would be from the Caribbean. Most likely Jamaica. I mean, the chorus comes in, you hear the dialect/accent the vocalists are singing with and you just assume. I know that’s what I did when I was nine. But it turned out Seeed were a group from Germany who were just really into their dancehall and reggae. Germans doing Caribbean music was something that sounded so strange to the simple kid I was. But it didn’t matter because every time the song came on in the menu screen, I would stop myself from playing matches just to let the whole thing play out. Seeed is a collective of many members, but it’s the three frontmen (Peter Fox, Dellé, and Boundzound – who I just found out while writing this, passed away in 2018) who take up the brunt of the vocals in their music.

‘Release’ is the fourth track on the group’s 2003 Music Monks album, something I should probably listen to just for the hell of it one of these days, and is a call to the heavens above for a break from life. As everyone knows, life in general can be hard a lot of the time. The people of Seeed recognise this too, and wish for a divine intervention that provides ‘sunshine and peace’ with a side of some good music, a loving lady, mariijuana and alcohol – of course EA Sports couldn’t endorse the latter two, so mentions of ‘smoking trees’ and ‘rum’ were censored in the FIFA game. Fox tells the listener that the music of Seeed helps to get rid of any negative feelings in the first verse, Dellé lines out the pressures of the music industry in the second, and Boundzound expresses the pleasures he has in being able to do what he wants while also looking for the girl who might just be the one. A sweet, summery song about relaxation, which I think we can all do with every once in a while. Weird to think I’ve known the song almost 20 years. Still sound so great as it did then. Also, there’s this other version of the song where the keyboards(?) play the melody of The Cure’s ‘Close to Me’. I don’t know where it came from, it’s not the version I’m used to, but I’ll embed it below anyway. Plus, I’ll put in the album version too, cause why not.