Back catalogue: Soundtracks

Review: It's 2025 and we're writing about the music from a video game. It's 2025, and this isn't the first time we've written about music from a video game. And it won't be the last. The difference is, in 2025 writing about the music from a video game is barely even worth commenting on, with symphony halls hosting live concerts celebrating the best sounds from playable worlds and everything from sweeping orchestral overtures used in epic adventure franchises to chip music accepted into relative degrees of the mainstream. Enter Akira Yamaoka, whose contributions to the pantheons of tunes have helped lay the foundations for taking video game music seriously in its own right. Breaking the mould not just for computer games but specifically survival horror tones with his first Silent Hill score, as you would expect, by the third instalment of the scariest series to ever grace a console this is a finely tuned process, in the best possible way. Eerie but cool, poppy but experimental, ambient, electronic, lofi-rocky and utterly absorbing as a standalone listen.