The Forest Floor: Music to Level Up Your Day: Cyberpunk 2077 (Part 1)

I don't know much about musical theory, nor am I a musically inclined person. However, I do love to listen to video game soundtracks. They can be a powerful listening experiences in their own right, or be as evocative as the scores composed for film. Each of these posts will feature a sampling of music tracks from a single game title, or series/franchise in some rare cases. A complete list of these can be found on the Video Game Music page.

Composers: P. T. Adamczyk, Marcin Przybyłowicz, and Paul Leonard-Morgan

Singers: Aligns & Rubicones, REL & Artemis Delta, Jason Charles Miller, Alexei Brayko,

Release Date: February 15, 2022

A freelance mercenary known as "V" (Vincent / Valerie) operates within the independent megacity and city-state known as "Night City". They are reluctantly imbued with a cybernetic "bio-chip" during a job that contains a digital version of the legendary rockstar and terrorist, Johnny Silverhand. The two are forced to work together when Johnny's consciousness begins to overwrite V's own. To survive they need to find a way to separate - something that could kill one or both of them.

Multiple licensed music artists from around the world contributed to Night City's fictional radio stations, with the real-life band Refused providing music for the fictitious band, Samurai. The songs vary widely in style but all touch on Night City's socioeconomic situation, violence, rebellion, death and suicide. The music was purposfully varied to reflect the different regions and groups within Night City. Some parts are "super dirty, super heavy" to make the player feel like "the perfect killing machine", while others are "beautiful and ambient" to reflect the nature of the city as both a "pretty and scary" place to be. In an interview the composers stated that they wanted to give 80s music a 90s flair, which they achieved by using analog synths for almost all of the music so that it would be electronic but "with a warmth to it". The soundtrack has been described variously by the team as "noisy, aggressive, industrial" and "psychedelic, edgy, and uplifting".

Friday Night Fire Fight | (Radio Song)