The evening before interviewing composer Ludvig Forsell I finally finished Death Stranding 2 after tens of hours of play. It was a spectacular finale that left me brimming with musical questions
Please beware, this article includes spoilers for Death Stranding 2’s ending.
Forsell described that particular finale sequence as his “pièce de résistance” in Death Stranding 2, a chance to create an Alan Wake 2 moment. But it’s also exemplary of how music and gameplay combine to form the musical identity of the game.
The first game’s mournful tone and Icelandic environments were captured in the music of Low Roar – whose lead singer Ryan Karazija passed away after the game’s release – in addition to Forsell’s dramatic score. For the sequel, Forsell returned, now with additional music from Woodkid and a whole playlist of Kojima’s favourite tracks. The more varied and dynamic gameplay of the sequel is therefore matched by its soundtrack.
Ahead of the Death Stranding world concert tour, Strands of Harmony, next month, I had an opportunity to discuss with Forsell how he composed the score, as well as that ending sequence, honouring Karazija, and what exactly is Kojima like to work with?
Let’s go back to the start, because I know you began working with Kojima back on Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. How did that come about? That’s a huge gig!
I’ve really got to give thanks to my senpai at the time, Akihiro Honda – who was composer on the Metal Gear team for a long while – who gave me a shot at composing the trailer for Ground Zeros for the Metal Gear 25th anniversary reveal. I’d just come on to the team. I was really just one of the junior composers, and he wanted me to try that out. And the stuff I did for that, Mr. Kojima latched on to. Throughout the process of composing the score for MGS 5 things changed and led to me then going along with the team to the new company of Kojima Productions after the split from Konami. But it was really just my superior being like, ‘Hey, I’ve done this gig for a long time, let’s give the new guy a chance to compose this trailer’.
And before you joined, were you a fan of Kojima’s work?
Metal Gear Solid was my first PlayStation game that I ever played. I played it with a friend of mine, and barely being able to speak English, we’re trying to figure out the Easter eggs and fourth wall breaking and finding the codec number on the actual box of the game. That had a huge impact on me as a gamer when I was just a kid. Since joining the video game industry in Japan, I was looking at different types of games that were being made. Within all that, Hideo Kojima‘s games and the Metal Gear franchise were really the stuff that I wanted to work on the most coming out of college.
After Death Stranding, you went freelance in 2021 but then obviously came back for the sequel. What drew you back to this project?
I always wanted to work freelance and work on multiple different things in many different genres and mediums. So it was hard to go up to Mr. Kojima and say that I wanted to do that. But at that time in 2021 he already said to me, ‘can we call you back for something in the future’, which was a surprise, because you never know how a conversation like that is going to go. It’s not that I wanted to move away from things; I wanted to expand my horizons. He was very open to that idea. And a year later, I got an email about the sequel, and jumped on it right away. It took a while before things really kicked into gear, but it felt like [there was] mutual understanding of how we wanted to handle things from the get go of me doing things in my own way.
What changed musically from Death Stranding to the sequel? What were you trying to achieve?
It really boils down to building on the base that we had from the first game, which was a very distinct type of sound. I wanted to expand upon the humanity of the score by adding human elements, like a small vocal ensemble, human voices, stuff like that. Also thematically, the score for the second one lent itself more open to things like adding guitars. Obviously, Higgs, the main villain, actually carries around a guitar in the game.
One of the main things that I wanted to do that’s slightly different from what you might be used to, is I wanted to write musical pieces that even though they’re supposed to be interactively working with how a player approaches an action scene, I still wanted to write them as musical pieces that ebbed and flowed within the actual track itself. I wanted the pieces to be listenable on their own, and then work with the team as to how we take that apart and put it together again within the game to make that actually work with the different types of tensions. Really having that musicality to the composition is something that I wanted to try out.
What was the starting point for the sequel’s score? Was there one theme that you composed first that then blossomed into the rest?
Over the course of the two and a half years it took me to compose all of the music for Death Stranding 2, a lot of things changed and we came up with new ideas throughout. I ended up doing the themes for the male characters, and then Woodkid did all the female characters for the game. Rather than me having a vision to start with, I knew I wanted to experiment with, for example, the vocal ensemble. The first game was very much like that, too – we did a lot of experimentation and threw things out at the start before really finding the sound. Now we had more of a base to start off of this time, but it was still going through those motions of experimenting and trying things out while we were doing them.
You mentioned Higgs before on the guitar and that wild glam-rock guitar-off. Where did that come from? What was your involvement musically?
This was originally a game design idea that came up and was shot my way where they said, ‘we have a guitar battle, and we need music for it’. They’d already shot motion capture for it, but I told them I have to write music, and then they have to adapt whatever the characters are doing to that. So there’s a whole process of figuring out how we’re going to do it with the entire sequence. It’s a long battle, and the guitar battle is part of that, so I ended up writing the whole thing as one big suite of nine minutes of music, with that guitar battle being the core of what I needed to do. I felt like ‘this is the shot’. This is where we need to go full on with the music. I’d just watched a full playthrough of Alan Wake 2, and was like, ‘this is our chance to do something like they did in Alan Wake 2’. I really wanted to push the music for it. We also worked with great guitarists up out in Nashville to get those solos. It’s sort of my pièce de résistance for Death Stranding 2.
The sequel feels like a more human story, but still with these strange concepts and otherworldly ideas. It’s about death, but also connection. How do you take all these themes and then interpret them into music?
This is completely different from composer to composer. I tend to look at it very blank and simplistic in a way: this is what is happening, these are the themes as adjectives, and then take my time to internalise that and see where that leads me. I don’t specifically go down the road of ‘I want to express this emotion, how do I do that with the piano’. It’s a process of internalising the ideas as a whole, and then seeing what comes out. The duality of Neil’s character, for example, is something where I really got to explore, and hopefully that comes through in the music.
How did you explore that?
So Neil Vana, or Luca Marinelli’s character for Death Stranding 2, is sort of the new version of Mads Mikkelsen’s character from the first one. However, I feel like we get to delve deeper into his motivations and his backgrounds. When we first see him and we battle, this character has a straightforward, darker side, but then the same musical motif is used for his human side, but in a different version. There’s different versions of the theme throughout the soundtrack. Also how he’s stuck in a loop, there’s an arpeggio in the theme that keeps on climbing but keeps coming back down. I call it the Sisyphus arpeggio. The idea behind that arpeggio is how he only gets to come out of this locked-in state as a ghost throughout his interactions with Sam, and you get to experience and explore his character throughout both the story and the music.
One of the things that I personally like about Death Stranding is obviously the music, but also the use of silence. It’s very lonely, and music is used very specifically and sparingly to punctuate certain points. How do you decide which moments need music?
This is something I feel we cemented with the first one. I originally wanted to put more music in different areas, but Hideo didn’t want to specifically put emotions into what the player was doing when it wasn’t something that was scripted. He didn’t want people to misunderstand where emotionally the story was going, or the mission that you were going through. We specifically wanted to have music during encounters with enemies that would give you the right amount of intensity, but then keep the normal very normal, and play with the ambiance of winds and really work hard on those sounds only to then give the player very satisfactory ends of missions when you’re climbing down the hill towards a city and one of those licensed tracks comes on. It’s really about the dynamics in-between that sets that apart.
Although now there’s the music player, so players can choose the music.
That was something we hadn’t figured out how to do in a way where it didn’t mess with the ideas that Mr. Kojima really wanted to present throughout the story. Because if you give people freedom to just listen to music all the time, it’s hard to really hit the points where you need the drama to connect in the right way.
“Hideo didn’t want to specifically put emotions into what the player was doing when it wasn’t something that was scripted.”
The soundtrack has your score, plus there are the licensed tracks and Woodkid’s music. How do you put all that together to make a consistent sound world?
For Death Stranding 2, that was really Mr. Kojima’s brainchild, how he oversees everything. It’s really hard when you’re working on a score to see the full picture the whole time. If anything, Mr. Kojima is the one that has the idea of how he wants everything to play out from the get go, and the rest of us are playing catch up. I’m not as much involved with that, but I’m continuously impressed with how he lays that out from a very early stage. I feel like there’s always the idea of how the end product is going to be.
With the first Death Stranding, Low Roar’s songs were a big part of the music, but lead singer Ryan Karazija sadly passed away in 2022. How important was it to honour him in the sequel?
With Death Stranding 1, even before I’d written any music for the game or found the sound for the game, we already had the announcement trailer with Low Roar’s music. I was really taking cues and learning off of Ryan and Low Roar’s approach to how they write music, and taking that into how I wanted to approach the score, as to not have huge gaps in timbre and emotional core. Ryan’s music was always a big part of how I sculpted what I created for Death Stranding overall, and that lives on in Death Stranding 2.
As I mentioned, Mr. Kojima didn’t want to infringe upon the open spaces with world music, but it’s always been inspiring to see what Mr. Kojima has been listening to lately and seeing how that influences the overall emotion in the story in both games. As a composer, I always take that in and see how that can influence and possibly give ideas to me. Obviously not having Ryan directly with us for the second one is incredibly sad. And I hope that, through the concerts especially, that we can pay tribute to his contributions to Death Stranding as a whole.
“Ryan’s music was always a big part of how I sculpted what I created for Death Stranding overall, and that lives on in Death Stranding 2.”
What is it like working with Kojima? A lot of people see him as this enigmatic, almost godlike figure, and he’s got this passionate fanbase that really reveres him. What’s he like behind the scenes?
Mr. Kojima is very hands-on with every single part of production. He’s there on the ground talking directly to the programmers, the game designers, the animators, the game designers, the cutscene animators, the sound design team, and music as well. I feel like with the music, it’s always been an open conversation where I’ve been given quite a bit of free reign as to how I approach things, maybe more so than other facets of the game design. I feel like Mr. Kojima is a fan of music generally. He doesn’t say that he can write music himself, so he doesn’t really infringe on my freedoms that way. So it’s always been really easy to come up with ideas and present them and push those through as much as I can. Generally speaking, I feel like he’s always given me a lot of freedom, and that’s something that I’ve always been very thankful for.
Death Stranding 2 is part of the Game of the Year conversation. Are there any other games that have particularly impressed you this year?
No, they all suck! [laughs] I tend to watch let’s plays a lot, so I’ve seen probably the entirety of most other games that are out there in the conversation. I think 2025 is one of the most insane years for gaming, because there are so many different types of games being held up as great games this year – many of those games being done by very small teams. So it’s really exciting to see Team Cherry with Silksong – three people did that insane game! – and obviously Expedition 33, just all these incredible great games that are now in discussion for Game of the Year. It’s also a really crazy year for music and games, because all these games are also being held up because of their music. I’ve been super inspired by a lot of these games. Expedition 33 definitely has one of the most fun soundtracks that also emotionally carries the story and everything. And being part of that whole discussion is really interesting and fun to see.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.