‘Following the GPU song was terrifying’: Behind Astro Bot’s unforgettable soundtrack

Astro Bot is not only one of 2024’s best games, it features one of 2024’s best soundtracks.

While this won’t come as a surprise to anyone who listened to the imperious Astro’s Playroom score, one of the absolute highlights of Astro Bot was the creativity, joyousness, and excitement laced into every tune.

Once again composed by Kenny CM Young (LittleBigPlanet, Tearaway), the soundtrack features remixes of fan favourites, such as the GPU song from Astro’s Playroom, as well as dozens of new compositions.

Not only that, the game contains five levels themed after classic PlayStation characters, complete with Astro-fied versions of those soundtracks. Now, a month removed from Astro Bot’s release, the game’s soundtrack is available on streaming platforms, allowing players to revisit their favorites.

Ahead of the release, we caught up with Kenny from his home in Scotland to chat about the soundtrack, those PlayStation homages, and more.

For more Astro Bot content, click over to our behind-the-scenes report from developer Team Asobi.

Video Interview: Kenny CM Young

With a soundtrack of this size, it’s almost difficult to know where to start when it comes to talking about your process. Can you speak to how an idea for a track forms, and are you seeing gameplay long before you start writing the music for that level? 

Kenny CM Young: Unusually for a composer, I’ve got a development kit, so I can play builds of the game. You’d think that would be normal, but that’s not standard practice. It’s quite hard to get a hold of a dev kit if you’re not a developer, but it helps that I used to work at Sony, and I know all the right people (laughs).

I could download builds of the game and check stuff out, I find that really important, particularly for those levels where it’s not clear exactly what it needs, it’s really important for me to be able to feel it.

Nico, the game director, is just really great. He really knows what the game they are trying to make is, which you think would be normal, but it’s something he’s particularly good at. He’s talking about his process, but for me, it’s about focus. He knows what’s important. He can tell you about that upfront, and then he can give you great feedback as to whether what you’ve done is achieving what it needs to do.

How long does it generally take? 

KCMY: How long it takes depends, when it’s very clear what a level needs, generally speaking, it’s quite tropey. So if it’s a fire level it’s like, alright, it’s heavy metal, you don’t even have to tell me at that point (laughs).

I’ve got this collection of tricks now to answer questions like “How do we make this fun?” “How do we make this robotic?” “How do we make this digital?” all those sort of pillars of the visual aesthetic and the art direction.

For something like Papa Tree or Bubbling Under, which have interactivity going on, something like that’s more likely to take like six, or eight weeks. For something like Papa Tree, there’s nothing tropey, so there’s no way to know what the genre needed to be. Asobi did know that they wanted that to be a song, which initially was kind of terrifying because obviously the GPU song went down so well, so they thought it would be cool to have another one of those.

There’s a bit of pressure going on there, but also, what am I supposed to write the song about exactly? It’s a tree. I didn’t think xylem and phloem, going back to my standard grade biology, was the right thing to sing about, so initially, I knocked that back and was like, “There’s nothing to write about.”

It was basically the track that’s in the finished game, but with backing singers, with the idea being that we would make you only hear the backing singers when you’re outside, so when you’re inside, we sort of fade those out. So it’s meant to be like all the little plants that are around the level are singing along. So I was like, “Yeah, they’ll be happy with that!” But Nico was just like, “No, I want a song.”

Astro Bot features over 90 tracks, including some that return from previous Astro projects. How different was it to work on a project that required that amount of music compared to Astro’s Playroom, which had a much more condensed tracklist?

The thing to address as well is that there are some other composers in the project too, and that, again, that’s just like a practical thing. How much music can one person write? (laughs).

There’s music that’s reused from Astro Bot Rescue Mission, and some of the tracks, mainly the ones from the other composers, are also reused from some of the earlier, sort of proto-Astro Bot games, so we’ve got some good coverage there.

I guess thinking as well is that, you know, there’s a lot of good music there, which a lot of people haven’t heard, so we’re quite comfortable reusing it. We already shipped two games together, so we had a good idea of how long it was going to take when it was a straightforward track.

There was a lot more experimental writing in this project than I had anticipated. We knew upfront that the Sony first-party stuff was going to be experimental in nature. Even though the brief was clear, insofar as it was like, well, “we need to take that IP and make it work in Astrobot,” that bit was clear and obvious, but actually what that means was a complete unknown.

I was on the project for two years, so it was just a big chunk of work. Obviously, everyone tries to make the best game that they can. No one’s setting out to make a bad game. But having it have such a good reception is just, you know, it’s not just icing the cake. It’s actually like a massive relief after pouring all your blood, sweat, and tears into something for that period of time. It’s pretty tense. It’s writing music day after day for two years, and it is full-on.

The music for the PlayStation-themed levels, particularly Bot of War and the God of War homage, was a particular highlight. What was that process like, and how much freedom did you have with the original material?

KCMY: That was actually the first one I worked on. It had the longest process because it was trying to work out, “Okay, what is the process of taking, what is fundamental, in that example, adult IP certainly, how do you take that kind of material and make it family-friendly?”

And for me, what was interesting was that little moment where you actually first rescued Kratos in the boat after the octopus boss. It’s a very weird mash-up because it’s like this sort of Astro Bot beach music mashed up with a God of War theme. It’s a bit weird, but that was the first thing we did, just to see, okay, that’s very Astro Bot.

It just wasn’t going to work in the gameplay level, which is much less Astro Bot and much more Kratos. So, that approach of transcribing the music and making it in synthesizers with ukuleles and vocoders for the robotic vibe wasn’t going to work. That was a good discovery, but a little bit nerve-wracking because it’s like, “What does it mean to be more Kratos but still have it work in Astro Bot?”

It’s a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, where you start with the jigsaw, and it’s finished, and then you just tear it all up, and you start, pushing little bits against each other that aren’t quite designed to do it. And if you try that enough, and you experiment enough, eventually you get it. It’s not at all the original, but you can hear and see bits of the original in it, and it’s in this new configuration.

The God of War track was actually the easiest to take to a new place because it’s so flexible; it was a lot more challenging to get that to work with the Horizon and Uncharted themes because those are big, old, sprawling themes that have multiple sections that are there. So that’s why those ones are a little bit more faithful to those melodies, because if you cut those up, it just stops being Uncharted, it stops being Horizon.

Have any of the composers of the original music reached out to you?

KCMY: No, not yet. I saw Julie Elvin was pretty thrilled at the fact that I’d used her vocals in the in the Aloy remix. Joris de Man (Horizon composer) seems pleased with the tunes. I’ve met Joris a few times, so I look forward to the next time I see him having a wee chat about that!

I don’t know if Greg Edmondson has done much game work outside of Uncharted stuff. I’m not sure what he’s up to these days. So he’s probably less contactable, and I’m not going to likely bump into him at a games conference anytime soon.

Further reading

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When I was working it out, you are conscious of the fact that this is someone else’s baby, that you are sort of cutting up effectively. But you know, I think the two things to try and do there is, like, Yeah, do it with love and respect and, respect and those are games that I’ve played that I’ve got a lot of respect for too. So, hopefully, that comes across in the music. I don’t think I’ve ruined it (laughs). I’ve tried to keep the essence of what was there whilst changing it to make it fit Astro Bot.

I was wondering as I was playing, ‘Are we going to get to the end of this and there’s going to be an Astro Bot version of The Last of Us theme?’

KCMY: (Laughing) I’ve got a banjo, I’ll give it a go! That sounds like the ultimate challenge.

After all this work and the huge amount of tracks you’ve made for the game, do you have a favourite? 

KCMY: I’ve got a soft spot for Casino. Aspects of that track are the closest I’ve got to a 1960s  or 1970s library track. It’s just me, you know, I’ve got a real interest in retro aesthetics, you can hear that in the music in this game in particular.

But that’s something that I originally got interested in for LittleBigPlanet because there are similar things about nostalgia. In a way, those productions have nothing to do with the notes; it’s the way you present the music. As a sound designer, that’s one of my skills. I’m not the best composer in the world. I can write a good tune, as a fiddle player, I think I’ve got an ear for a melody, but you know, in terms of my actual ability as a composer, there’s a lot of people who are better at it than me.

One of the ways to make music more sonically interesting for me is to present it in a way that would make most people run in the opposite direction. So like most there’s not a lot of composers and games who are like, “Yeah, library music!” whereas I’m like, “Yeah, library music!” So it’s yeah, it’s like a guilty pleasure and a fetish being forced on the audience.

Astro Bot’s soundtrack is available now on all major music platforms, including Spotify.