Opening Murder of the Universe, and its first chapter, “The Tale of the Altered Beast,” is a short track called “A New World.” Starting with eerie synthesizers and followed by a burst of electric guitars, the song sets the stage for the album’s darker themes and music. The track is narrated by Leah Senior, who describes the thoughts of someone remembering the story to come after waking up covered in blood and dirt. Stu described “The Tale of the Altered Beast” in an interview for Observer. “‘Tale of the Altered Beast’ is the first one. It chronicles a human person being stalked by an Altered Beast, which is kind of a distorted half-creature, half-human, which we can maybe all relate to. Eventually the person is consumed by the beast and becomes the beast himself, goes on to cause more havoc, create more beasts, then he dies. It sounds familiar, you know?”
The video A BRIEF HISTORY OF PLANET EARTH opens with the band recording the song at Flightless HQ as well as strobing footage from the unfinished music video for “The Tale of the Altered Beast.” According to their whiteboard, the song was initially called “Intro.” The song also appeared in promotional material for Murder of the Universe, which was released on June 23rd, 2017.
Despite being released in 2017, “A New World” saw its live debut on 2022-10-05 at the PNE Forum in Vancouver and would be played three times in 2022 — all of them with Leah Senior doing narration. The song would see two appearances in 2023, this time as an instrumental. One of these from 2023-03-23 would see the song in a rare combination: “A New World” > “Altered Beast III” > “Alter Me III” > “Altered Beast IV.”