Alterna Citizen Program M-00: Init (System Noise)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube, extracted audio

Credits

Music Director: Kenji Yamamoto
Sound Coordination: Minako Hamano
Music & Arrangement: Soshi Abe, Sayako Doi
Sound Leads: Emilio Gutiérrez López, Pablo Balaguer de Diego
Sound Design: Ignacio Blázquez Roelas, David Bolaños Gallardo
Audio Technical Support: Yuichi Ozaki
Original Metroid Music: Kenji Yamamoto

Info

I’ve been in a murderous rage since the Metroid Prime 4: Beyond trailer dropped last week. It’s not because of anything in the trailer itself, it’s fine. I’ll play the game! I like the Metroid.

I’m mad because, as I mentioned in my previous talk post, the trailer very blatantly features music by (or imitating) Kenji Yamamoto, and this has brought back a discourse that drove me insane at the end of 2021 and start of 2022: how Metroid Dread has a garbage soundtrack.

I’ve mentioned several times here that Dread is my favorite soundtrack in the series, but it came out a bit before I started music blogging in mid-2022, so I never posted a review here. Now seems like a really great time to try to put into words how much the soundtrack means to me. But in order to get there, I need to start by bagging on Kenji Yamamoto. I swear I’m not doing this entirely out of spite because it’s his music that precipitated this, as the things I’m going to say are things I felt before Dread came out.

Yamamoto is one of the most boring composers at Nintendo to me, not just of the ones who’ve worked on the Metroid series but at the entire company. This is something I’ve danced a bit around saying in my previous posts about his works, but I’m coming right out with it here. There are some occasional tracks that I do appreciate the writing of, but for the most part I don’t like his melodies, I don’t like his chords, I don’t like his rhythms, it’s all very straightforward and I need that freak shit to keep living. His production is of course good, which was especially apparent back in the 2000s comparing Metroid Prime to the full-production soundtracks done by anyone else at Nintendo for years after, so when I do like a piece by him it usually tends to be a real ambient one where the focus is on the sound design.

But I like Metroid music as a whole, right? I do, just different parts than the Yamamoto parts. I love the atonal minimalism of Metroid II, the rhythmic irregularity and bluntly fake instrumentation in Super Metroid, the dark atmospheric tension of Metroid Fusion, and the weird angular prog of Metroid Prime III: Corruption. This is the stuff that comes to mind immediately when I think about Metroid music, not the Norfair themes from Super or the Phendrana Drifts theme from Prime.

Leaving aside Metroid II for a sec, the other three things I listed all have one thing in common: Minako Hamano. She started working on the series at the same time as Yamamoto, and it’s her music that defines the sound of the series to me, not his. It always has, since before I even knew what was hers and what wasn’t.

When Dread came out, I initially heard some rough comments about its soundtrack: the sound quality was pretty bad (especially compared with the previous game Samus Returns, which has quite good production!), it was really boring, and it didn’t sound like Metroid. But my friend Chimeratio listened to it first, and he said it was actually kind of ridiculous. So I also listened to it, and… it had everything I wanted from Metroid music in it. There was rhythmic irregularity, both subtle and blatant. There was bluntly fake instrumentation, clearly an intentional textural choice given more realistic sound sources and complex sound design used in the same tracks or elsewhere. There was a whole lot of dark, atmospheric tension. And there was a whole lot of weird, angular prog. This was all mixed together with some cool electronic production and modern sound design choices.

(And for good measure, there’s atonal minimalism too, though the atonality of Dread tends to be a lot of whole tone scales and not Metroid II’s bizarre nonsense.)

It feels like it fell, fully-formed, out of an alternate timeline where Minako Hamano defined the modern Metroid sound, not Kenji Yamamoto. It feels like they very intentionally rejected the idea of “Prime music” and instead modernized and celebrated everything else surrounding it. It’s hard for me to express just how fulfilling it was, artistically and spiritually, to hear a Metroid soundtrack that felt like it was written for me specifically and barely anyone else in the entire world.

Metroid Dread’s soundtrack is uncompromisingly dark, hostile, dissonant, and alien. It perfectly evokes a broken, artificial, and dangerous world. It’s deeply Metroid, in composition and in spirit, and I mean that as the highest praise that I can possibly give.

Metroid Dread is the best soundtrack in the Metroid series, and it’s way ahead of everything else.

Recommended tracks:

My guesses are that Sayako Doi was largely responsible for area themes, featuring electronic production, and Soshi Abe was largely responsible for boss themes, featuring more prominently orchestral instruments. I also suspect that Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano could have contributed a small number of pieces, area themes and boss/action themes respectively.

• “E.M.M.I. Zone (Pursuit Mode)” (Doi?) is a suspenseful electronic disaster

• “Artaria Lava Area” (Doi?) has shades of “Sanctuary Fortress” from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes; I’m kinda curious if Yamamoto composed the main version of this theme, which is even moreso

• “Corpius” (Abe?) has a little bit of a jazzy feel in the brass writing, which is very Hamano

• “Drogyga (Detached)” (Abe?) is a distorted version of the boss theme that plays when the boss is vulnerable, really deranged sound design

• “Ghavoran” (Doi?) features an instantly iconic fake ahh vox sample

• “Map Station” (Doi?) is a rare light in a sea of darkness; the way this song feels is exactly the way I wanted my game i had that dream about the machines again to feel^[1]

• “Burenia Depths” (Doi?) has a lot of cool random noises in it

• “Artaria (Frozen)” (Doi?) features an instantly iconic piano sample with sick manipulation; this piano specifically coexisting with the fake instruments like in “Ghavoran” is what convinced me that the fakeness is intentional music direction

• “Raven Beak (Phase 1)” (Hamano/Abe?) I described in my ongoing Twitter faves thread as an “angular whirlwind of violence”; this piece is very idiosyncratically Hamano, though Abe seems to be very directly inspired by her to an extent that Doi isn’t so maybe he’s pastiching

(track titles are unofficial)