Death Stranding 2’s Theme Song Is A “Toast” To The "Adventurous, Queer, And Bizarre"

Music has always been a big part of Hideo Kojima’s games, but that’s never been more true than with Death Stranding 2. Like the first game, it features both original music and curated selections from artists Kojima identifies with, such as Low Roar, Silent Poets, and Caroline Polachek. This time around, Kojima also worked with one of those artists, recruiting French singer, composer, and graphic designer Yoann Lemoine, better known as Woodkid, to create an immersive album that intertwines with the game’s world and story.

“What really differs from my records is that it's procedural,” Woodkid tells Inverse, “So I had to create these songs that sounded like pop songs, but then we had to reverse engineer them and strip them back so that the engine would be able to program them and develop them in a way that would be fully integrated with the gamer's experience and actions.”

Crafting this album was an integral part of Death Stranding 2’s development, and Inverse had the chance to sit down with Woodkid and dive into the process.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

How integrated were you into the development process of Death Stranding 2?

Woodkid: Very deep, actually. We started three years ago, and I worked on the first songs at Kojima Productions in Tokyo, surrounded by the game designers and Hideo.

The idea was to compose songs, not just make songs and sync them in the game, but really create songs out of the lore and the world. And give that material to Hideo so that he could shift his storyline, edits, cutscenes, and gameplay based on the elements that I would do, and vice versa.

So we had a pretty strong interaction, especially with the sound programmers, music programmers, and the game designers on some scenes where the music is very procedural. When I started, the game was probably about 20 or 30% done.

How did the creation of this album differ from your usual creative process? Was there anything that you learned from working on a video game?

Woodkid: It was more difficult and easier at the same time. It's always easier when I collaborate, because I can rely on someone's vision, and I don't always have to question everything.

So it gave me a lot of freedom to explore stuff. And if Hideo liked it, I liked it, and if he didn't, I wouldn't. I trusted his vision, so it was pretty easy on that level.

But what really differs from my records is that it's procedural. So I had to create these songs that sounded like pop songs, but then we had to reverse engineer them and strip them back so that the engine would be able to program them and develop them in a way that would be fully integrated with the gamer's experience and actions.

In that way, I have to think of the songs in almost every alternative and dimension possible, which is very interesting. Because we went all the way to running the songs in a sampler so that the chord progressions would evolve based on harmonic theory, and the song lyrics and the way the voice started being cut opened to the gamer’s actions. All this was just way more elaborate than what I would do on a record. It was exciting and triggered the geek in me.

A lot of the songs are specifically about a single character. How did you go about capturing the essence of these complex characters?

Woodkid: I think it started with Kojima giving me very simple hints on every dimension of each character. But there’s also a very strong theme throughout the game that keeps coming back, and I think it’s a thread between all the songs.

There are colors associated with every character in the beats and textures, and one of them is surprisingly violent for a character that doesn’t seem to be. Another one is a song about grief, and it’s heavy and comes back in the game at difficult moments. It was these hints of the emotions behind characters in the storytelling that really moved me.

It was more like the music and textures helped us build cutscenes and gameplay, and associate them with characters. As the storyline was moving on and Kojima was feeding me more information on the characters, I was able to write the storylines in the lyrics, and I’d send those to Kojima, and he’d say, “Oh, that’s good, that resonates with this.” We’d build songs like this, and they’d make sense with their storylines, because everything was built together.

One of the more interesting tracks in the game is “Minus Sixty One.” Can you tell me more about what it’s trying to evoke?

Woodkid: The funny thing about that song is that I wrote it prior to my collaboration with Kojima – it's from my second record. But when he came to me, he was like, “There's one exception I want to make in this soundtrack, I want to reuse one of your songs.” And it's this one for multiple reasons.

The first is that it uses the Suginami Chorus, which is a choir of young girls I worked with in Tokyo. So it has a Japanese influence and connection. Two of my songs from that record were already used in the first Death Stranding, and he wanted to open the game with “Minus Sixty One.” I think the reason is, when I wrote that song, I was questioning my privileges as a musician and as a person who makes a fairly good amount of money from music. The song is probably one of the most political I've written. And Hideo found resonance in that song to talk about the general theme of Death Stranding, and his comment on hyperconnection.

Society is always valuing hyperconnection, and he wanted to question that. When I wrote it, I wrote it as almost a Tree of Life kind of reference, that champagne character who lives in these buildings and watches society from a high floor, and sees this childhood come back before his eyes in a metaphysical way. I think it works very well with the beginning of the game because it’s very powerful — a man holding a child. What’s funny is that the lyrics are a little bit dissociated from the game, and I think that creates a lot of friction, and connects the game with the real world.

There’s a few things that I talk about that resonates with the game, there’s a line where I talk about global warming, saying, “Now the water level rises in my cold paradise, where men sit in circles and talk numbers; I never really liked the way they think of life as some kind of gamble and watch the city drown.”

There was the idea of men being in conference rooms and watching the water rise in New York City, and flooding the city. And there’s a thing about flooding in the game, about water rising and global warming. It’s just connected so well to the theme of the game, even though I didn’t think about that when I wrote it.

Kojima has been frank that a lot of Death Stranding 2 is inspired by COVID, and that theme of connection. Did the pandemic influence your music as well?

Woodkid: At first, Kojima wanted me to write one song. And when he called me, it was still during the pandemic. I said I’d do it, but I'm sick, of what I called email music and Zooms and stuff like that — I’ll come to Tokyo, and I managed to get a visa when Japan was not open yet, and I got in just in the middle of the pandemic.

We did the whole beginning of that work together with masks on. And I remember Hideo suffering a lot from losing his teams to remote working. I remember he was in the process of building his new studio when I went there. COVID happened, and then they still did it. He did it as a present to his teams, so that they would have an amazing place to work in, and he was adamant that he wanted his teams to come back around again, physically, to work. But it was a struggle because of how impactful COVID was in Japan.

I remember seeing him very, very depressed about this whole situation. And I think he injected a lot of that suffering in the game, and a lot of the extreme fear of distance with people. I think it fed the music, and I connected to that because I was also, at that time, extremely sick of email music. It's not the way I see art, and I don’t think it’s the way Hideo sees making games.

Can you tell me about the game’s theme song, “To The Wilder”? How is it different from other tracks, and how did you capture the entire theme of the game into one song?

Woodkid: The idea of Wilder came very quickly, and when I wrote the song first, it was slower than the version we know today. It was just this long lament that I made on soaring strings. I had that idea of “To The Wilder,” something that was about going somewhere and being wild.

But then I was like, wait, Wilder doesn't just mean the wilderness of nature – it also tells something about the characters being wild, crazy, and adventurous. The song transformed from being this idea, like the movie “Into the Wild,” to making a song that’s almost like cheering and giving a toast to people who are adventurous, queer, and bizarre, people who aren’t afraid to be who they are.

There’s that bridge at the end that I think sums up a lot of who Hideo is, and who I am – who Hideo is talking to with these games. This bridge ends up referring to what it takes to walk forever, and what it takes to be who we are.

Hideo is someone who’s always been walking on a side path, who’s tried to make things outside the rules of the industry, and never walks in the path of someone else. Hopefully, I’m a bit like that, or at least I’ve tried to use the side doors of the music industry to exist. We both want to celebrate the excitement of walking on paths that aren’t pre-existing.

Your music has had an interesting relationship with games for a long time, having been featured in ads for Assassin’s Creed and others. What is it like to go from that to actually being part of a game’s development? Do you want to keep working in games?

Woodkid: It makes total sense in the way that I grew up with video games. I know video games very well and play a lot, about two to three hours a day.

My first job, when I started in Paris, was in a video game studio. I'm a CG artist, and I’ve worked with CG for years now, still do on an almost daily basis. I’m not just a musician. So there's something with that medium that connects a bit with everything that I am, everything that I like, and also just is connected to my culture. I wouldn't say it's full circle, because it's still like an anomaly for me in my life. I just would have never expected it.

What I know is that I'm not even sure I'm going to be able to make music for games after this, but I know that I might move to actually making video games. In general, just as a creator, because I feel a lot of things are calling me toward this — a lot of open doors.

You know my connection with Riot and Arcane, and Ubisoft and Assassin’s Creed, and with the world of video games, it just makes sense? I feel like I’m always trying to move toward projects that are beautifully crafted and a little special, so I think you’ll see me around video games.

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach launches on June 26 for PS5.