Following the introduction heard in “Welcome To An Altered Future”, “Digital Black” describes the dystopian future its narrator hinted at. In this future humanity is faced with an existential threat — most likely climate change. Unwilling to die, they transfer their consciousness to computers, creating a society of computerized people who have no connection to humanity. The song’s narrator (Han-Tyumi) is the last human born through natural means and is disillusioned with perpetual, unending life. Any light the world may have had has faded into digital black — as dark as it can get. Outside of the song’s lyrics, which feature many unique words like “lugubrious” and “caliginous,” “Digital Black” is a brutal track with loads of feedbacking, delayed guitars, a steady motorik beat and a quick callback to the story’s opening riff.
A demo for the song appears on Demos Vol. 6: Music To Burn Money To. This version is entirely instrumental with no changes in structure compared to its final version. It also features a jam over the riff of “Han-Tyumi, the Confused Cyborg.” The song was released as a CD single and then on Murder of the Universe on June 23rd, 2017. It would also appear in a promotional video for the album.
In Jason Galea’s music video for “Han-Tyumi and the Murder of the Universe” (released April 30th, 2017) the song is depicted through a live performance of the band presumably shot at the Night Cat in Naarm (Melbourne) with occasional text writing out Han-Tyumi’s dialogue. In the band’s 2022 Reddit AMA Stu mentioned that this video was one of the most fun to shoot.
The song made its live debut on 2017-09-23 at the Audiotree Music Festival in Kalamazoo as part of a medley of mostly Murder of the Universe material. This was mainly: “Welcome To An Altered Future” > “Digital Black” > “Han-Tyumi, the Confused Cyborg” > “The Lord of Lightning” > “Cellophane.” Throughout 2017 this was used to open the band’s shows, though in 2018 was pushed back to the second set. 2018 gigs also began to remove “Welcome To An Altered Future” from the sets with “Digital Black” becoming the opener instead. This shortened medley carried on until October where it got shortened to “Digital Black” > “Vomit Coffin” > “The Lord of Lightning.” The song saw heavy rotation in 2018 and even had a performance of the song from 2018-08-17 appear in THE NONAGON MOVIE. In 2019 the song appeared in a shortened “Han-Tyumi and the Murder of the Universe” suite consisting of “Digital Black” > “Vomit Coffin” > “Murder of the Universe” though 2019-11-21 saw a quick “Murder of the Universe”-less performance. The song would be played twice in 2020 with another shortened medley and a performance on 2020-02-21 adding “Han-Tyumi, the Confused Cyborg” back in. After an unusual solo performance for “Garage Rock Night” on 2021-12-22, “Digital Black” was played exclusively as part of the nearly complete suite seen on 2020-02-21.