We’re less than 18 hours from launch! How time flies! While we wait, we wanted to share a bit more about the music featured in Gone Home. Our sound is a mix of garage band and old-school Riot Grrrl licensed music, and a brilliant original score by our friend Chris Remo.

Since Gone Home is set in 1995, and focused on the travails of a teenage girl in the Pacific Northwest, we knew we wanted to get authentic Riot Grrrl music into the game. So we worked with Kill Rock Stars to license tracks from a couple of the most groundbreaking Riot Grrrl bands of the time: Heavens to Betsy and Bratmobile. The sound is lo-fi and emotional, just the right soundtrack for this episode in the life of Sam Greenbriar.

Some of the tracks are more mellow, like Some Special by Bratmobile, which emphasizes a kind of nostalgic summer teenage feeling:

Heavens to Betsy was the first band fronted by Corin Tucker, who would go on to form Sleater-Kinney in the mid-’90s. Their sound is more aggressive and raw, though some tracks, like Complicated, are also a bit mournful:

Finally, we met a local Portland band, The Youngins, at the Grrrl Front Music Festival earlier this year. We checked out their music, and it has this perfect female-fronted garage band sound. So we “cast” them as a fictional band in the game! Their sound could easily have emerged fully-formed in 1995, so in the game their music plays the part of Girlscout, a band that we created for the story of Gone Home. Their music is rad– check it out!

The role of the licensed music in Gone Home is to emphasize a sense of place, both geographically and temporally– it is as much a part of the game’s setting as the house you explore and the notes you read. But the music you’ll spend the most time with in the game is the original score. Chris’s music plays ambiently as you explore the house, but he also created a custom track for each and every audio diary in the game, giving each voice sequence its own unique feel. Here’s a sample from one audio diary, with the voice removed (no spoilers!)

We’re hoping to make the original score available for purchase sometime soon after Gone Home launches– Chris has created more than 30 minutes of original music, which works great on its own. As for the music licensed from the bands, visit their Bandcamp pages linked from the embedded tracks above to hear more of their stuff and buy the albums yourself!

Alright!! Almost there! See you tomorrow for LAUNCH DAY!!