The music in DEATHLOOP is described as “psycho-rock” by its audio director.

During the Bethesda showcase at E3 2019, Arkane Lyon’s upcoming first-person action game DEATHLOOP was announced via a cinematic trailer (embedded below).

Not much about the game has been revealed thus far. When DEATHLOOP was announced, publisher Bethesda Softworks described the game as “an eternal struggle between two extraordinary assassins”. Players will be tasked with hunting down targets on an island called Blackreef.

Judging from the game’s title and its tagline of “If at first you don’t succeed… die, die again,” it seems death will not only be inevitable, but recurrent too.

When it comes to the music side of things, how does Arkane Lyon intend to ‘capture the spirit of chaos in music form’? As the studio posits in a recent article on the Bethesda website, by not sticking to one specific kind of music.

“First, we define the most important elements we want to be clear to the player and highlighted in the game,” said DEATHLOOP’s audio director Michel Trémouiller. “Usually you have to focus on a few keywords that describe the game, and that’s a good starting point for our work on the audio team. With DEATHLOOP – as with all previous Arkane productions – we have a host of interesting key words and layers that make up this universe.

“DEATHLOOP has keywords like magical, military, scientific, mysterious, Northeim, carnival… the list goes on,” he said. “But of course, all these concepts cannot be injected into just one style of music. We make complex and original universes, so it’s impossible to copy a pre-existing music style.”

As was shown in the announcement trailer and promotional artwork, DEATHLOOP’s visual style has hints of the pop art movement during the ’60s mixed with the militaristic gloominess of the Cold War period. Trémouiller elaborated further on how that art style was translated into sound in order to become the score for DEATHLOOP.

“If we had to sum up the main feeling of DEATHLOOP’s music, we would say it’s a psycho-rock style that’s a bit crazy like the inhabitants of the island of Blackreef,” he said. “It’s tinged with experimental [synthesisers] from the late 60s and early 70s, blended with some of the ingredients from the Dishonored music – string instruments and some orchestral touches – that made it so special.

“There’s this very unique feeling you get when you walk through Blackreef’s neighborhoods and it’s unlike anything we’ve ever attempted at Arkane before,” he added.

No release date for DEATHLOOP has been announced yet, nor has it been revealed what platforms the game will be launching on.