Life is Strange’s soundtrack is full of licensed bangers, and still hits even 11 years later

With Life is Strange: Reunion recently wrapping up the decade-long story of Max Caulfield and Chloe Price, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks thinking a lot about the game that started it all. 2015’s Life is Strange came during a hugely formative time in my life—going through some big changes, returning to college after a three-year gap and in that stage of life where you realise you don’t actually have everything figured out the second you leave school.

I would wait up until ungodly hours waiting for its next episode to drop, desperate for just a few hours more of Max’s rewind powers and Chloe’s bombastic personality. Seriously, I stayed up until 4am waiting for the second episode to actually hit the PlayStation store. I was truly a sicko for this game.

More than its janky dialogue (I will forever remind you the lines “welcome to the moshpit, shaka brah” and “go fuck yourselfie” exist), and even more than its heartbreaking tale of queer love and teenagehood, the thing that has stuck with me in Life is Strange is its music.

I do a lot of yapping about original scores in videogames, but I don’t do nearly as much about all of the work that goes behind hand-plucking licensed tracks—though I wrote about BioShock’s excellent use of real-world music as a narrative tool, if you’re interested.

That’s partly because licensed music in videogames was largely utilised for immersion purposes. Think ripping guitar to your favourite metal tracks in Guitar Hero, or tuning into a radio in Grand Theft Auto to tracks befitting of each game’s era and setting. Or they simply existed to be cool, like the absolute mountain of licensed music in sports and racing games.

But when episodic videogames boomed in popularity in the mid-2010s, the place licensed music had in them felt distinctly different. Spreading one videogame into five or six instalments made them feel more like a TV show, which meant that their music was used in a similar manner. I think a lot about the way Scrubs utilised its music choice to perfection: using tracks like The Fray’s How to Save a Life to punctuate emotional moments, or even the revival’s most recent episode making use of Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity for a silly cold open sequence.

Got Well Soon

Developers like Telltale were using licensed music like a TV show to absolute perfection. Picking tracks to open up episodes and set their tone excellently—Tales from the Borderlands is my favourite example of this, especially the episode they open up with Jungle’s Busy Earnin’.

But to me, no game does it better than Life is Strange. Despite the fact that it sometimes feels like Dontnod is an alien being told what American high school life is like (the developer is French, so I can’t be too harsh) it managed to tie everything together with its music choice.

Walking Max through the halls of Blackwell Academy while Syd Matters crooned “to all of you American girls…” was the pinnacle of indie, coming-of-age movie chic. It immediately clued me into what type of game I was getting into: an unapologetically dramatic teenage adventure, surprisingly grounded despite leaning heavily on supernatural elements.

Life is Strange uses tons of this sort of moody or cosy indie rock. Distorted acoustic guitars, sad men, angsty men. A vibe that feels authentic even when deeply manufactured. An experimental vibe. Just some sad people making sad music in their sad studio. But that experimental flavour fit so perfectly with Life is Strange, a game that also felt like Dontnod figuring stuff out.

The game’s excellent soundtrack choices culminate in the very final song, Foals’ Spanish Sahara. A song so incredibly loaded with angst and emotion that I genuinely couldn’t imagine a more fitting ending track. It works no matter the choices you’ve made—whether you’re attending funerals, driving away from a town destroyed, or reflecting on things you could have done better. It’s a song so good and so encapsulating of the game that current series developer Deck Nine brought it back for Reunion, if you come face-to-face with the Dead Timeline Chloe.

I think that subsequent Life is Strange games have some pretty stellar song selections, too—I got very giddy hearing Girl in Red’s I’ll Die Anyway towards the beginning of Reunion—but nothing will ever come close to how meticulously curated the first game’s soundtrack felt. Scrappy, emotional, and heartfelt. Just like the very game each song starred in.