Durrstep Song (Geometry Dash) - Tealy and the Crew
This detail had not been mentioned during the initial level reveal.
Beric had shown Tealy the level. Tealy had looked at the frame perfects and the auto swing and the decoration. They had discussed the gameplay. They had discussed the verification. They had covered a reasonable amount of ground.
Nobody had discussed the song.
Tealy found out the same way everyone found out, which was opening the level for the first time with sound on.
Clubstep started playing.
He looked at Beric.
Beric looked back with the expression of someone who had made a deliberate choice and was prepared to stand behind it indefinitely.
"Clubstep," Tealy said.
"Yeah."
"You made a level with 243 frame perfects designed to be the hardest in the game," Tealy said, "and you put Clubstep on it."
"It's a good song," said Beric.
"It's the Top 3 hardest demon and it goes to the Clubstep song."
"The Clubstep song is good, Tealy."
This was, technically, not wrong. Clubstep was a good song. It was also a song that every person who had played Geometry Dash for more than forty minutes had heard approximately nine hundred times, attached to a level that was famously difficult in its own right but was not, by any current metric, the hardest level in the game. It was a classic. It was comfortable. It was the last song anyone would have predicted attached to a 243-frame-perfect technical monster designed to dethrone everything above it.
It was so aggressively, specifically Beric that Tealy couldn't even argue with it.
"Does it loop well," Tealy asked.
"Perfectly," said Beric.
"Of course it does," said Tealy.
The community had opinions about the Clubstep usage.
These opinions were varied but could be loosely organized into three categories.
The first category was people who found it genuinely funny and respected it as a choice. These were the people who understood that using Clubstep on a would-be Top 1 was so specific and so confident that it looped back around to being correct.
The second category was people who were annoyed by it on principle, who felt that a level of this caliber deserved original music or at minimum a song with more perceived prestige, and who said so at length in threads that Beric did not read.
The third category was people who had not initially noticed and had simply assumed it was a remixed or remastered version of something, and who upon being told it was just Clubstep, regular Clubstep, had gone back to listen again and come out with complicated feelings.
Beric's response to all three categories was the same, which was no response, because he had said what he needed to say about it, which was "it's a good song," and that was the full extent of his public engagement with the discourse.
What Tealy had not known, and what became relevant approximately three weeks into DumbDird's verification process, was the remix.
It had come up because DumbDird, somewhere around attempt 8,000, had mentioned in the group chat:
"DURR TALLY I MADE A SONG FOR THE LEVEL"
Tealy: "The level already has a song."
"DURR YEAH BUT I MADE MY OWN TALLY"
"DumbDird Beric chose Clubstep—"
"DURR I KNOW TALLY BUT I'VE BEEN PLAYING IT FOR SO LONG I STARTED HEARING IT DIFFERENT"
"Hearing it different how."
"DURR LIKE WITH MORE DURR IN IT"
Tealy had read more Durr in it and made a decision not to follow up, a decision he reversed four days later when DumbDird sent a file to the group chat labeled "DURR CIRCLES REMIX (DURR VERSION) by DumbDird.mp3"
The remix was.
It was something.
It was built on Clubstep, clearly, the bones of it were intact, the melody was recognizable, and DumbDird had clearly spent real time on it because there was structure to what he'd made and the production was not incompetent, which was a surprise that Tealy processed quietly and said nothing about.
But throughout it, woven into the arrangement with what could only be described as commitment, were DumbDird's own vocals.
Not singing, exactly. Not rapping. Something that existed in the space between those things and a person narrating their own internal monologue at rhythm-adjacent intervals.
"Durr," said the remix, over the Clubstep drop.
"Durr durr," it said, during the bridge.
During a section that corresponded to what Tealy now knew was the hardest wave segment of Durr Circles, DumbDird had layered in a sustained "DURRRRRRR" that rose in pitch and volume and cut out exactly at the moment the section ended, which meant he had timed it to the level, which meant he had thought about this structurally and with intention.
At the end, over the final notes, quietly:
"Durr. Nice."
The group chat response was immediate.
Beric listened to it twice and said: "The timing on the wave section vocal is accurate to within half a second. He synced it to the level."
Greeny said: "The production is more competent than expected."
Dird reacted to the file with 👍, which for a four minute audio file was either high praise or exactly the same as everything else, and with Dird those were not always different things.
Blara said: "Why does the Durr in the bridge actually go hard"
This was the most important message sent in the group chat in recent memory and everyone knew it.
Tealy listened to it a third time with the volume up and sat with his feelings about it, which were that Blara was correct, the Durr in the bridge did go hard, and that DumbDird had made a Clubstep remix that was good, which was a sentence he had not been prepared to think today or any day.
DumbDird used the remix for the remainder of the verification run.
All 37,000 subsequent attempts, roughly, were done to his own voice saying Durr over Clubstep at various emotional registers. By month seven he had listened to his own remix more than any song had ever been listened to by any person for any reason, and his relationship to the word Durr within the context of the song had clearly evolved into something meditative, the way a word stops meaning anything after you've heard it enough times and becomes instead a texture, a rhythm, a thing that exists in the body rather than the mind.
When he completed the level at attempt 45,532, the remix was playing.
The final "Durr. Nice." played over the completion screen.
In the room, DumbDird said, simultaneously with his own recorded voice:
"Durr. Nice."
It was either an accident or the most perfectly choreographed moment he'd ever produced and nobody could determine which, including DumbDird, who when asked said "DURR TALLY I JUST FELT IT" which explained everything and nothing as usual.
When Zoink beat it two weeks later, someone in his chat asked if he'd used the original Clubstep or the Durr remix.
Zoink said he'd used the original.
Then he paused.
"There's a remix?"
Chat confirmed there was a remix.
Zoink looked it up on stream and listened to approximately forty-five seconds of it, specifically the wave section "DURRRRRRR" portion, and sat back.
"Okay," he said.
His chat ran at unreadable speed.
"Okay," Zoink said again, nodding slowly at nothing in particular. "Okay I kind of respect it."
He said Tidal Wave difficulty lowkey. He said the decoration goes hard. He said respect to Beric.
He did not say anything else about the remix on stream.
But three days later, someone in the community noticed that Zoink's personal practice copy of Durr Circles had been updated.
He'd switched to the Durr remix.
He had not commented on this.
He did not need to.
"Durr. Nice."
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