“Flash, Bam, Alakazam!”

Musicianship: Inon Zur’s tracks tell stories so rich they can’t be listened to on their own. Combines the natural and man-made.

Application: You can’t escape music in this game. Nat King Cole while shooting up radioactive mutants? Sign me up!

Atmosphere: Enriches the environment it plays in, to the point where not having music would damage the story. Stellar.

What We Can Learn: A good soundtrack doesn’t have to be good on its own to be effective at carrying a narrative.

The unfortunate thing about Fallout 4 is that it isn’t that great. The story feels forced, as if scripted by focus-group, and in classic fashion for a Bethesda Softworks role-playing game, it appears glitchy and unfinished. What Todd Howard and co. have successfully created is one of the most beautiful pieces of aesthetic work in gaming; set 200 years after a nuclear-powered World War III in an alternate USA where atomic power has become dominant instead of the electrical transistor, the music and visuals of Fallout 4 capture a world that combines both the beauty of nature and the long-term consequences of the Cold War military-industrial complex.

The soundtrack expresses this eerie synthesis through its being split into two parts. The first, a 3.5 hour long set of original compositions by long-time series composer Inon Zur, present a more experimental approach to classical music. A consistent theme is the juxtaposition of quite jarring, ever-so-slightly detuned piano notes and industrial percussion with smooth, organic strings, expressing how the natural world is still healing from the results of war.

Most tracks flow easily between these two elements, with the best example of this being Of The People, For The People; the piano sounds bleak, even melancholy, yet has a viola countermelody that gives a sense of hope and a note of optimism (pun intended). I will add, however, that this soundtrack is almost designed to be listened to in vitro; it’s so jarring and tells a story so rich that it is almost impossible to listen to without wanting to start up the game and play.

Zur’s pieces are applied almost perfectly, further cementing them as being incomplete without gameplay; tracks like Standoff are almost mechanical in their dissonance, and kick in as soon as a combat is joined, whilst the 13 tracks titled Wandering will drift in and out as the player wanders across the devastated Massachusetts landscape. It captures something almost cinematic about the game that is lost in soundtracks to big-budget films. It’s not loud, or aggressive, but it carries meaning.

The second part of the soundtrack chooses to explicitly show an important part of the Fallout world’s environment: its 1950s-esque aesthetic. The developers have curated a fantastic selection of popular music from the period. These pieces are incorporated into the game through the mechanic of an in-game radio from a wristwatch-computer, with a choice of three radio stations.

One can choose between original compositions by vocalist Lynda Carter (who also plays in-game character Magnolia), classical pieces such as Strauss’ Ride of the Valkyries and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake Finale and, perhaps best of all, the Diamond City Radio station, which is dedicated to mid-20th century pop/rock. Funnily enough, many of Diamond City Radio’s songs are deliberately chosen to evoke the nuclear context of the game: Atom Bomb Baby, Orange Colored Sky, even Crawl Out Through the Fallout are all songs one can listen to whilst using nuclear weapons. How ironic.

The irritating thing is that one can only listen to either the radio or the ambient soundtrack at any given time, which is a shame because not only are the pieces themselves wonderful in their own right, but they carry narratives all of their own. A simple fix would be incorporating the radio tracks into the main soundtrack and playing a mixture; for example, Diamond City Radio tracks in urban areas where it would make sense for them to be heard, and Zur’s ambient soundtrack whilst wandering or in combat.

Fallout 4: The Original Game Soundtrack is available for digital purchase on iTunes. For the vinyl enthusiast, the entire soundtrack is also available as a 6 LP vinyl set from Bethesda.

Fallout 4 is available for PS4, XBox One and PC from Bethesda Softworks.