Returnal Soundtrack

Returnal Soundtrack, Bobby Krlic, 2021

Among the PlayStation 5’s early releases, Returnal was arguably Sony’s most prominent system exclusive. Developed by Housemarque, the game offered an intriguing fusion of third-person shooting and roguelike design. Each time astronaut Selene – stranded on the alien planet Atropos – dies after battling extraterrestrial creatures, she is resurrected and her surroundings change. This surreal time loop feeds directly into Returnal’s psychological horror, as Selene is haunted by visions of her own home and pieces together the mystery of this Hades-like nightmare world through audio logs. Although the game’s difficulty and lack of a save feature drew some ire, critical reception was strong overall, with reviewers rightly highlighting its unexpectedly well-developed story and immersive atmosphere among its greatest strengths.

Crucial to that atmosphere is the Returnal soundtrack, written by Bobby Krlic – an inspired choice for the project. Krlic’s first two albums, The Haxan Cloak and Excavation, dealt explicitly with death and established his ability to “build[…] a whole world” through music, as Pitchfork observed in its review of Excavation. The same piece also noted that “Excavation is more soundtrack than a regular album”, so it was hardly surprising that Krlic’s career would eventually move in that direction, alongside production work for the likes of Björk, Troye Sivan and Goldfrapp. After making his film-scoring debut on 2016’s Blackhat, Krlic’s breakthrough arguably came with folk-horror film Midsommar, which earned him the Best Original Soundtrack prize at the 2020 Ivor Novello Awards and a Breakthrough Composer of the Year nomination from the International Film Music Critics Association in 2019.

A self-professed fan of video games and their music since 1996’s Quake, Krlic had been involved with Returnal since mid-2019, beginning to compose after two months of discussions with the developers and, as he put it in an interview, “trying to do a kind of sci-fi horror that hopefully hasn’t really been done before”. Returnal allowed Krlic to delve deeply into modular synthesis, while also using elements custom-built for the project – samplers, software and even a bespoke synth rack. He chose to focus less on the game’s action than on Selene’s emotional state, underscoring her sadness, confusion and determination to uncover the truth behind the place imprisoning her. For the soundtrack album, Krlic then reshaped his interactive layers into bespoke arrangements so that “whatever narrative is in the source material comes through in the soundtrack.”

Krlic does indeed accomplish his aim of creating a kind of sci-fi horror score that feels genuinely new, not least because the Returnal soundtrack refuses to submit to genre convention. He avoids many of the clichés horror scores routinely fall back on: there are none of the familiar, ineffectual whining strings or dissonant brass blasts that so often stand in for genuine unease. Krlic’s work is far more ambitious. He writes a low-key, almost entirely textural score with scarcely any identifiable melodic material. Rather than dealing in jump scares and quivering crescendos, the music shrouds Atropos – and Selene’s past – in a perpetual mist that never fully reveals the true shape of the horrors lurking within.

Yet that very withholding, that sustained deferral, is what makes Returnal’s unnerving atmosphere so potent. We sense monsters in the shadows, but have no idea what form they take, when they may strike, or even whether they are anything more than projections of a fractured mind. Krlic keeps the listener in a constant state of dread, but without ever granting the cathartic release of tension finally breaking. Only on “Helios” does the soundtrack reach a sustained pitch of overt menace. A cold industrial pulse is more domineering than anything else on the album, before being countered by a harp figure at the opposite end of the tonal spectrum, sounding like a voice lost in the dark. Krlic uses the rhythm’s stoic, relentless forward motion to create a piece of slow-burning horror that crushes any fleeting hint of melodic uplift or redemption.

The rest of the Returnal soundtrack is markedly more subdued, almost static in mood. How, then, does Krlic sustain attention with music that in lesser hands might collapse into mere underscore? Firstly, he puts the custom-built synth rack he has discussed in interviews to extraordinary use. From opening track “The Crash” onwards, he excels at manipulating instruments until the boundary between music and sound design, between acoustic and electronic sources, begins to dissolve. The pieces emerge as immaculately sculpted collages of drones and enigmatic noises, producing haunting, elusive textures that genuinely do feel unlike anything previously heard in a horror game score.

The resulting compositions are anything but monotonous. Not only are Krlic’s combinations of timbre consistently spellbinding, but the tracks are developed with impeccable judgement. Their minimalist design often hinges on the repetition of a single striking idea, such as the sharply crescendoing string note from 2:05 in “The Crash”. Yet Krlic measures the force of these gestures perfectly, guiding each cue seamlessly from one disquieting sound-combination to the next. That sense of development, combined with the score’s remarkable sonic palette, gives the Returnal soundtrack an irresistible atmospheric pull that sustains the entire album and leaves no room for filler.

Particularly powerful is “Citadel”, which needs only a handful of drones, spectral voices and wavering synths emerging from and retreating into the shadows to conjure vast, empty spaces populated by unknowable entities. “Motionless” sets an unexpectedly maximalist, melancholic synthwave melody against fuzzy, burnt-out bass timbres that drag the once-hopeful music back into depths of loss and hopelessness. “Murals” delivers the soundtrack’s most emotionally complex and moving passage: an astonishing chromatic three-note string motif whose sharply attacked first note viciously cuts into the melody’s nostalgia and regret.

Krlic shapes all of these sonic materials with immense care. Yet for all the score’s array of sounds whose origins are often impossible to identify, his most important tool is immediately recognisable: the human voice, albeit manipulated in numerous ways. It is these disembodied, fragmented, eerie vocals – mostly female, and thus suggestive of Selene herself – that give the Returnal soundtrack much of its emotional force. They also turn the score into a direct examination of its protagonist’s psyche and of the world engulfing her, entirely in keeping with Krlic’s stated intentions.

These voices lend the music’s generally muted demeanour a necessary trace of humanity and warmth. Yet, as throughout the score, that expression remains tantalisingly ambiguous, since their often anguished tone offers no real comfort, suggesting the absence of peace rather than its presence. The soundtrack’s recurrent feeling of bottled-up remorse and guilt is embodied most vividly in these wordless vocals, and they are responsible for some of its most hair-raising moments.

At first, closing track “Dream Already Seen” offers glimmers of hope through melodic motifs shimmering in the far distance, only for them to be crushed by blindingly harsh dissonances. After this, the female solo voice heard on earlier cues returns, remote and desolate, as though crying out for help. Then it suddenly crescendos, moving ever closer to the listener in a heart-stopping moment of genuine creepiness, before subsiding and leaving the ending enigmatic, open to interpretation. It is a superb final demonstration of how Krlic lands a devastating last blow without resorting to theatrics, drawing instead on the overwhelming atmosphere he has sustained throughout the Returnal soundtrack.