Bobby Krlic (The Haxan Cloak) – “The Crash”
Bobby Krlic, the British producer known as the Haxan Cloak, has carved out a nice little lane for himself as a film and TV score composer, working on high-profile projects like Midsommar and The Alienist: Angel Of Darkness. And now he’s moving into the video game world with his score for the upcoming PlayStation 5 game Returnal, a sci-fi third-person shooter with psychological horror elements following a space pilot stranded on an alien world and stuck in a time loop. (Given the title of the game, it seems like Oneohtrix Point Never would’ve been an obvious choice to compose the score, but the Haxan Cloak is a good pick too.)
Returnal and its soundtrack are both out at the end of the month. And today, we’re getting a taste of Krlic’s score with “The Crash.” In an interview with PlayStation, Krlic says that the track “really sums up the atmosphere of the game. You know, it sums up the narrative, it sums up the characters of Selene and the planet pretty succinctly. It also uses the breadth tonally of everything involved in Returnal: this custom granular processing, the strings, woodwinds, drum machines, distortions… everything that’s present in Returnal is somewhere to be found in that track. So it felt like a no brainer for me that would be kind of a lead — in inverted commas — single.” Listen below.
The Returnal OST is out 4/30 via Milan Records.