Inside the music of The Last of Us 2 with composer Gustavo Santaolalla – TechRadar

The dystopian Seattle of The Last of Us 2 is a vision of the Pacific-Northwest unlike anything witnessed in the pages of Lonely Planet. The cordyceps fungus has lain waste to a city flooded by busted waterways and overgrown with foliage, which only serves to camouflage its diseased population. Rusted campervans share blocked highways with abandoned tanks and the detritus of a guerrilla conflict that is dysfunctional, desperate and coming to get you.
But amid the chaos of this beautiful apocalypse there are scraps from the past and connections with a vanished life that help to build the humane core running through Naughty Dogs universally lauded new blockbuster. Here, for example, you will find the Valiant Music Shop. Scavenge beyond the corroded synths and warped vinyl to discover an acoustic guitar, where Ellie can practice her newfound craft and, even, strum the chords of A-has Take On Me. 
Indeed, for all the accompanying headlines around character bloodlust, crunch culture and LGBTQ+ themes, music plays a decisive role. Its there in the unblinking devotion of Joels Future Days Pearl Jam cover, Ellies reworking of New Orders True Faith with its bullseye refrain of “My morning sun is the drug that brings me near. To the childhood I lost, replaced by fear” and also, of course, in the soundtrack of Gustavo Santaolalla.
Like The Last of Us, the overarching tone of this immersive experience is set by the Argentinian composer, who feels as integral as any component in realizing the bleak heart and wilderness soul of these debased environments. Santaolalla, who won Oscars for his Brokeback Mountain and Babel soundtracks, sees clear parallels in his methods across cinema and gaming.  
Musical score inspired Last of Us 2 storylines 
(Image credit: Naughty Dog)
“I work differently from some other composers,” Santaolalla tells TechRadar. “The industry standard in the film world, the movie is made and they create a rough edit and start adding temp music and the composer comes at the end. I dont work like that. All the movies that I have done, a lot of the music and in some cases the whole score, for example Brokeback Mountain, I did the whole score before one frame had been shot. The themes, the sonic fabric, all that was done prior to the filming. 
“Neil

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