Death Stranding 2 is bigger and more ambitious — and that includes its music

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is an expansive, captivating sequel filled with huge environments to explore and a big story from Hideo Kojima to try and wrap your head around. But one of my favorite additions is a small one: an in-game music player that basically functions as your own iPod.

Woodkid, a co-composer on the game (and whose real name is Yoann Lemoine), tells The Verge that the music player was important to Kojima because it’s “the way Hideo is in everyday life… He plays songs all the time.” (And posts about songs on social media, too.) “I think he wanted the players to be able to have the same experience,” Woodkid says.

Music was a big part of the original game. Some of my favorite moments from the first Death Stranding took place when songs from artists like Low Roar, Silent Poets, and Woodkid kicked in while exploring the game’s world. That still happens a lot in Death Stranding 2, and it’s just as effective at setting a mood. But with the personal music player, accessible right from the pause menu, you can create your own vibe as you’re traversing the game’s expansive environments.

Woodkid worked with Kojima for three years to make music for DS2. In the game, his music can morph and change based on the player’s actions. In the opening moments, for example, Sam has to cross some treacherous mountain terrain to return to his shelter with Lou while Woodkid’s “Minus Sixty One” plays in the background.

As highlighted by Kojima in a recent livestream, when you run, you’ll hear drums in the song, and when you stop, they’ll stop. If you take a certain route, piano will kick in as other elements fade out. The whole sequence has a bunch of elements like that. Woodkid tells me he had to reverse engineer the song as part of what was needed to make everything work behind the scenes, and when he plays the sequence, he still gets surprised by what the engine is doing.

To help write the music for Death Stranding 2, Woodkid digested the big themes of the game, which he says are intimacy, fatherhood, grief, escapism, a “very aggressive sense of political violence” about the eco-anxiety of the world, and the concept of connection and how it’s positive and negative in the time of social networks. He then tried to inject those ideas into the songs.

That all manifests in a wide variety of musical styles in Woodkid’s music for Death Stranding 2. The game’s main theme, “To the Wilder,” is slow, haunting, and beautiful, while “Tmrrw,” which plays at a pivotal cutscene featuring the character named Tomorrow (played by Elle Fanning), has a much harder, industrial edge. Songs from artists like Gen Hoshino and Caroline Polachek show up, too. Ludvig Forssell, who composed music for Death Stranding and Metal Gear Solid V, is a composer for DS2 as well.

I think the breadth of musical styles is good, maybe almost necessary. Death Stranding 2 still has a lot of long journeys from one place to another, so like a great song on a real-life road trip, the right track at the right time can make a dull drive much more memorable.