Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn, much like everyone else who played it, caught me completely by surprise. It combined absorbing open-world design, surprisingly deep lore and world-building, astonishing enemy design, an intriguing mystery at the core of the story, resonant character work and a combat/stealth system that was intricate and played more like puzzle solving than fighting, all of that spearheaded by the alluring presence of Aloy as one of the strongest main characters I’d played as in a long while.

The score, written by a team made out of Joris de Man, Niels van der Leest, The Flight (Joe Henson and Alexis Smith) and Jonathan Williams, is a striking combination of melodic passages of gentle beauty and synthwork of incredible depth, nailing that unique combination of fantasy and sci-fi that makes Horizon‘s world so special. The music quickly resonated with players, who latched onto things like Aloy’s theme and Julie Elven’s stunning vocal work as some of many more highlights from the game.

I have been eagerly awaiting Horizon Forbidden West since 2020 and, now that it’s here, my only disappointment is its bad timing as it caught me during a particularly busy period of my life. It and Elden Ring dropped within weeks of each other and it’s telling that I haven’t tried either yet. But I’ll get to Forbidden West eventually; I can’t imagine myself not revisiting the world of Aloy after how much I enjoyed my first time around.

Forbidden West brings Oleksa Lozowchuk to the fore as composer for the score, joining the returning Joris de Man, Niels van der Leest and The Flight. Also returning is Julie Elven, again performing Aloy’s theme, but many more passages of absolutely rapturous beauty. Other soloists featured are Melissa R. Kaplan, who performs another prominent motif in the score, Ariana Gillis singing In the Flood, originally written by Guerrilla‘s sound designer Lovisa Bergdahl, Gareth McLearnon and Kristin Naigus on woodwinds, Drew Jurecka performing various string instruments, choral ensemble musica intima, among so many others.

One of the key changes for the sequel’s music was its focus on the emotional journey of the characters, as opposed to the first game’s focus on music to convey location. As a result, Forbidden West features more character-based themes, more prominence from Aloy’s own theme, and a deeper, richer musical experience. The synth and organic elements are also further intertwined together than they were in the first score, which further solidifies the music’s unique identity.

With the caveat that I haven’t played the game yet, I think this score is an absolute triumph. It’s rarer than you’d think to get a score written by a multi-composer team and have it be this cohesive, well-rounded, and yet still not feel like any of the composers sacrificed their individual voices to fit into the sound. It doesn’t feel like Joris de Man’s score, or Oleksa Lozowchuk’s score, or The Flight’s… it feels like exactly what it is, a score by all of them, and somehow it all works together in a way that doesn’t disrupt or undercut itself by the myriad of different personal styles.

Major props for that point should go to Guerrilla’s music supervisor Lucas van Tol, who played a crucial role in ensuring that continuity and cohesion across the board.

It’s also an absolutely mammoth score. Released in three volumes that came out over the course of a month, it’s over seven hours long (and that’s just what was released). There is a ton of music here, and I’ve been engrossed by it since I heard the very first volume that was released.

It wasn’t hard for me to realize that I had to make a playlist out of this. It’s weird to think that the last time I published a Modding the Score playlist was back in November when I did the one for The Banner Saga trilogy. I didn’t intend for the series to go on hiatus for this long, but Horizon Forbidden West is absolutely the right score for Modding the Score to make its comeback.

As usual, join me after the jump if you want to know how I put this playlist together. Enjoy!

TRACKLIST:
DISC 1
1. Aloy’s Theme – Forbidden West
2. In the Flood (Ariana Gillis ver.)
3. Echo of You
4. The Trail We Leave Behind
5. Singular Purpose
6. Dawn Eases Night
7. Defenders of the Sky
8. Built to Kill
9. Shelter from the Storm
10. In All Its Splendor
11. Contingency 13-F
12. The World on Her Shoulders
13. Rusted Sands
14. Edge of the Sundom
15. Look Deeper (Extended ver.)
16. Storming the Gates
17. Unshackled
18. In the Dust, to the Death
19. This Place, This Moment (Extended ver.)

DISC 2
20. As Before, We Are
21. No Footfalls to Follow
22. Her World, Her Legacy
23. Savior of Meridian
24. The Pride of the Arena
25. Steel the Mind
26. The Time of Ashes
27. Gemini
28. Second Chance
29. Breached
30. Trinity
31. The Strength to Make a Stand

Behind the Scenes

Something I learned while making Final Fantasy VII Remake’s playlist was that, when it comes to game music, soundtrack albums rarely abide by the law of diminishing returns that exists throughout so much of film and TV music where it feels like, the longer the album is, the more filler is in it. Or at least it feels like it doesn’t affect it in the same way. I struggled so much just trying to figure out what to cut and what to keep from FFVIIR’s playlist, to the point where it’s even a miracle I was able to get it down to under 150 minutes; I couldn’t fathom having made it any shorter.

Horizon Forbidden West was a similar situation. My original plan was to, naively, make a 90-minute playlist out of the 7+ hours of music that were released. Then just my selection of personal highlights, before I even decided how I was going to approach this, clocked in at twice the target. I could already see I was going to struggle with it.

Part of my approach with Modding the Score is my desire to show others everything I like about a score, which is a hard compulsion to reign in in order to make a playlist that ultimately represents the score better and trust that it will be enough to get someone to listen to the full thing and discover that for themselves. So much of what I cut from the first draft I could live with not being on the playlist… but then I also cut a couple of tracks that I absolutely adore but were better left off, including Lovisa Bergdahl’s original rendition of In the Flood.

Even with all the cutting, the playlist ran for 30 minutes longer than expected, which is a huge runtime even by Modding the Score’s standards, but I couldn’t bring myself to take any more music off. I was going to have to adapt the listening experience to it.

You probably noticed that the playlist is divided into two discs. Well, the resulting length allowed me to play with structure in a way that hadn’t occurred to me prior to listening to Forbidden West’s multi-volume release. Every playlist I’ve ever done for Modding the Score, even the lengthy Final Fantasy VII Remake one, has been made as an unbroken, continuous experience; whether the listener actually does it like that is a different matter.

With Forbidden West, I started to wonder if I could incorporate the idea of having discs within the playlist as a way to build a natural stopping point around the halfway mark. That way, if the listener wants to take a break, they can stop there and still feel like they’ve listened to something with its proper beginning, middle and ending, and not just half of a thing.

The playlist still has its own overarching structure building over the course of two hours of music, but each half reasonably stands by itself a bit better. The first half then opens with Aloy’s Theme – Forbidden West and concludes with This Place, This Moment. The second half opens with the choral majesty of the solemn As Before, We Are, which works by itself as a striking opener if you take a break before it, and as a way to decompress after the thrilling previous tracks if you do a continuous listen, and runs all the way through to the end.

As I was figuring out how to make this structure work, I started to think about themes and how I would factor them into the equation. I wanted the playlist to have an interesting musical arc, and using the themes from the score in a conscious way would allow me to arrange the tracks in a way that facilitated that.

Aloy’s Theme was a given, as the most recognizable musical identity from the franchise, but my lack of knowledge about this game would be my biggest disadvantage when it came to the others, as I don’t know how many of them (and there are many themes and motifs here) were important to the game’s narrative.

In the end, I settled on three to serve as anchors– Aloy’s theme, In the Flood, and a motif introduced on the album with Echo of You. While the motif from Echo of You and In the Flood’s reprises –particularly the 9-note motif that recurs throughout that song– are front-and-center throughout a lot of the music, Aloy’s theme is developed in a much subtler way, often fragmented or completely changed into new variations.

This allowed me to get away with populating the playlist with it. Fragments of Aloy’s theme appear halfway through Shelter from the Storm, or throughout tracks like The World on Her Shoulders, the spectacular Look Deeper and Savior of Meridian. Otherwise, the theme only appears in its exact original form during Second Chance.

A variation of the theme opens Her World, Her Legacy, and is the musical cornerstone of the action-heavy pair Unshackled and Breached. I used this to my advantage by placing these tracks at the climax of each half for opposite reasons.

At the end of the first half, Unshackled pays off the energy that both Look Deeper and Storming the Gates had built up before it, and at the cusp of this thrilling high, the listener is then unexpectedly thrown off the deep end with In the Dust, to the Death. The variation appears again directly after, during the reflective This Place, This Moment, allowing the listener a chance to catch their breath after the previous track’s viciousness.

During the climax of the second half, instead of starting with a high, Gemini falsely leads us with that soaring statement of In the Flood into more of those deliciously dark textures that build into the bombastic Second Chance (which itself features an arpeggiated motif that I used Singular Purpose near the beginning to introduce). The heroic full statement of Aloy’s theme there brings us from the darkness into Breached, neatly paying off that variation and the theme as a whole.

Mixed into the theme’s musical journey are In the Flood and the motif from Echo of You. The latter two are intertwined on some of the tracks, which helped a lot in figuring out how I was going to use them. Look Deeper’s extensive treatment of both musical ideas felt, both emotionally and thematically, like the perfect lead-in to Storming the Gates and its energetic use of In the Flood, and that in turn felt like the perfect way to lead into Unshackled.

This whole idea wouldn’t have worked nearly as well as it does if it wasn’t for the one specific track that allowed all three themes a proper pay off– Trinity. A wordless duet between vocalists Julie Elven and Melissa R. Kaplan, the track masterfully weaves Aloy’s theme, the motif from Echo of You and In the Flood together. By itself, it’s a pretty stunning and emotional piece of music. With the three themes together it adds a whole unique dimension to it, and that allowed me to create a sense of finality to the playlist’s musical flow. Without it, something would have felt like missing, and the experience a bit emptier.

The playlist closes with The Strength to Make a Stand, the one track credited to all five composers and which has been used in promotional material for the game. While it doesn’t directly quote Aloy’s theme, it allows for the playlist to end on a high as we hear Julie Elven’s beautiful vocals one final time, and even a final flourish from In the Flood.

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HORIZON FORBIDDEN WEST
Music by Joris de Man, Niels van der Leest, Oleksa Lozowchuk and The Flight
Music supervision by Lucas van Tol
Orchestrations by Joris de Man and Oleksa Lozowchuk
Ensembles conducted by Peter Davison and Oleksa Lozowchuk
Featured vocal solos by Julie Elven, Melissa R. Kaplan and Ariana Gillis
Featured solos by Traz Damji (percussion/synths), Sarah Davison (cello), Reinoud Ford (cello), Jaron Freeman-Fox (various strings), Jasper Grijpink (clarinet), Anita Jansen & Roger Cramers (hobo/cor d’amour), Nick Jongejan (guitar), Drew Jurecka (various strings and woodwinds), Blair Lofgren (cello), Gareth McLearnon (woodwinds), musica intima (vocals), Charles Mutter (violin), Kristin Naigus (additional woodwinds), Herwig Schaffner (violin/viola) and Jaap de Vries (bassoon).
“In the Flood (Original Version)” music, lyrics and performed by Lovisa Bergdahl
“In the Flood (Ariana Gillis Version) and “Cracked Core” performed and lyrics by Ariana Gillis, music and lyrics by Oleksa Lozowchuk and Lovisa Bergdahl.