Cyberpunk 2077
Some worlds are defined as much by their sound as by their image. Few recent examples demonstrate this better than Cyberpunk 2077. Developed by CD Projekt Red, the studio behind the acclaimed The Witcher game series, the game marked the developer's move from the dark fantasy world of Geralt of Rivia into a radically different kind of future. Released in 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 is set in Night City, a vast metropolis where advanced technology, corporate power, consumerism, body modification, violence, and social inequality have transformed almost every aspect of human life. Yet this world did not originate with CD Projekt Red. The game is rooted in the Cyberpunk universe created by game designer Mike Pondsmith, whose tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020 provided the foundation for its setting, technology, factions, and vision of a dystopian future.
At the center of Cyberpunk 2077 is V, a mercenary attempting to establish a reputation in Night City's dangerous criminal underworld. What begins as a potentially career-defining job quickly turns into a struggle for survival when V becomes the unwilling host of a prototype biochip containing a digital engram. The engram belongs to Johnny Silverhand, a legendary rebel rockerboy and former terrorist whose consciousness has been preserved in digital form. Played by Keanu Reeves, Silverhand becomes an increasingly important presence in V's life as the two attempt to understand their strange connection and find a way to prevent the technology from permanently taking over V's mind. From there, the story expands into a much larger exploration of identity, mortality, memory, and the question of what it actually means to leave a mark on the world.
The game's scale is central to that experience. Night City is not simply a backdrop for the story, but a world filled with competing factions, corporations, fixers, mercenaries, gangs, celebrities, criminals, and ordinary people trying to survive within a society increasingly dominated by technology. V's journey can take radically different forms depending on the choices made along the way, from relationships and personal loyalties to decisions that ultimately determine the fate of both V and those around them. This combination of open-world exploration and a deeply character-driven narrative became one of the defining characteristics of Cyberpunk 2077, allowing players to experience Night City not merely as a setting, but as a place in which their own version of V could take shape.
For Renovatio Records, this release represents a first. After years of producing custom editions devoted to film scores, Cyberpunk 2077 marks the first time that the label has turned its attention to a video game score. The transition is a natural one: like a film, a narrative-driven game can use music to establish atmosphere, define characters, shape dramatic momentum, and guide an audience through an emotional journey. Yet the interactive nature of the medium presents its own unique challenges. In Cyberpunk 2077, music can accompany a carefully scripted story sequence one moment and an entirely unpredictable player experience the next. The score therefore exists simultaneously as dramatic scoring, environmental music, and part of the living identity of Night City itself.
The musical identity of Cyberpunk 2077 emerged from a collaborative scoring process. The game's original score was written by three composers: Marcin Przybyłowicz, P.T. Adamczyk, and Paul Leonard-Morgan. Przybyłowicz, who had served as music director on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Adamczyk were already part of CD Projekt Red's internal music team, while Leonard-Morgan was brought in to contribute a different perspective to the project. Rather than dividing the soundtrack into three clearly distinguishable bodies of work, however, the composers worked toward a unified musical language, sharing instruments, synthesizers, sounds, and even musical material between cues. Music could be broken down into layers and reused or recombined in different contexts, allowing a piece written by one composer to become part of another composer's work. This gives the score a remarkable coherence despite its multiple authors.
Thus, the music is built less around a single genre than around an attitude. Its electronic elements can be cold, abrasive, and mechanical, but they are frequently contrasted with organic instruments and performances. Electric cello is particularly important to the score, at times subjected to distortion and electronic processing until its original acoustic identity becomes difficult to recognize. Drums and bass provide much of the music's physical impact, while layers of noise, synthesizers, and processed instrumentation create an almost tactile sense of machinery in motion. It is music that rarely sounds clean for long. Even its more melodic passages tend to exist within a deliberately damaged or unstable sonic environment.
That philosophy is established almost immediately in this Renovatio edition with “V.” As an opening statement, the cue does two things at once: it introduces V's musical identity and establishes the sonic world in which the character exists. The electronic textures, percussion, and processed sounds make Night City feel less like a futuristic backdrop than a living machine. From there, “The Rebel Path” immediately pushes the album into much more aggressive territory. It figuratively introduces Johnny Silverhand not simply as a character, but as a disruptive force entering V's life, with pounding percussion, industrial electronics, distortion, and a persistent rhythmic drive giving the album its first major jolt of aggression.
There is also a particularly clever connection between Johnny's score and the music of SAMURAI, Johnny's rock band, whose songs are performed by the real-world hardcore punk band Refused. The principal idea in “The Rebel Path,” which becomes Johnny's most recognizable musical motif, is essentially derived from the guitar riff of SAMURAI's “The Ballad of Buck Ravers.” In other words, Johnny's thematic identity is not merely represented by music that sounds like his fictional band. The score actually takes a piece of that band's musical language and transforms it into underscore. The distinction between Johnny the character, Johnny the musician, and Johnny's memory therefore becomes deliberately blurred. P.T. Adamczyk, who wrote much of Johnny's material, has spoken about how much he enjoyed working with the character, while the composers as a whole treated the game's fictional music and original score as closely interconnected parts of its world.
From there, the first part of the album establishes the various forces surrounding V. “Meet Dex” and “Corpo Deal” move into the mercenary and corporate underworld, maintaining the rhythmic and electronic vocabulary established by “The Rebel Path” but making it more atmospheric and menacing. “Chrome and Blood” introduces the Maelstrom gang and some of the most overtly industrial music on the first disc, emphasizing the violent, chrome-heavy side of Night City. “Braindance Calibration,” by contrast, briefly strips things back into a more synthetic and technological space, providing an important change of texture before the album returns to the increasingly dangerous events surrounding the Konpeki Plaza heist.
The Arasaka material introduces another important musical identity. “Patricide” brings in the ominous string progression associated with Arasaka, a motif that gives the corporation a very different musical character from the street gangs and mercenaries encountered earlier. The score's approach to Arasaka is particularly interesting because it does not rely exclusively on electronic futurism. The composers have described experimenting with detuned basses, electric cello, koto, and other Eastern instruments, often processing them until their original identities became difficult to recognize. The music suggests both immense technological power and something ancient and ritualistic beneath it.
The death of Jackie Welles, V's partner, then changes the album's emotional direction. “Jackie's Demise” is the first major consequence of the events that have been building since the opening tracks, and “The Voice in My Head” takes that change even further. Johnny is no longer simply an external presence intruding into V's life. The conflict has moved inside V's own consciousness. Slower electronic and string textures replace much of the relentless forward motion of the opening section, while Johnny's motif appears in a particularly striking cello passage. At the same time, V's own theme is brought into the foreground on cello, turning what was introduced at the beginning as a statement of identity into something much more tragic. The cue also introduces the musical material associated with Mikoshi, establishing an idea with distorted and unnerving female vocal effects that will remain important until the album's final act.
The album subsequently opens outward again, moving through the different musical identities of Night City's gangs and criminal factions. “Cloudy Day in Japantown” provides a moment of atmospheric relief while introducing the Tyger Claws' Japanese-inflected sound world, before “Tyger Claws” returns to aggressive percussion and distortion. “Sugar Skull Turf” does something similar for the Valentinos, but with Latin rhythmic elements incorporated into the electronic and percussive framework. “Extraction Gig” and “Scav Hunt” return to the more generic mercenary and industrial language of V's work. Together, these cues demonstrate one of the score's most effective ideas: Night City does not have one musical identity. It has a collection of them, each reflecting a different part of the city's social and cultural ecosystem.
This is particularly apparent when the album moves into Judy Alvarez's story. “Finding Ev” marks another significant shift away from the harsher action material, introducing Judy's theme as one of the score's most distinctive melodic ideas. Where much of the preceding music is driven by percussion, distortion, and electronic texture, Judy's material is considerably more melodic and emotionally exposed. That contrast becomes increasingly important on the second disc, where “Bells of Laguna Bend” gives her theme one of its most intimate and atmospheric presentations, and “Thoughts Breathe Easy” transforms it into a beautiful trip-hop-influenced romantic piece. The same musical idea can therefore function as character introduction, intimate reflection, and romance without losing its identity.
The transition into the Badlands introduces another of the score's strongest thematic identities. “Winds of the Badlands” introduces Panam Palmer and the Aldecaldos through music that could hardly be further removed from the industrial aggression of Night City. Acoustic guitar becomes central, surrounded by soft, low-frequency ambient synthesizers and long sustained tones. There is an almost physical sense of space in this music, with the sustained notes suggesting the distant horizon and the lighter textures evoking the desert wind itself. More importantly, the music captures something fundamental about Panam and the Aldecaldos: beneath their toughness is a sense of warmth, vulnerability, and belonging. That material develops through “Ursa Major Leak” and eventually reaches its emotional culmination in “Outsider No More,” where the acoustic guitar becomes even more prominent as V moves from being an outsider to becoming part of the clan.
Other parts of the city receive equally distinctive treatment. “Digital Loa” moves into the mysterious and technologically ominous world of the Voodoo Boys and Pacifica, incorporating unusual wooden percussion and woodwind-like textures into its electronic soundscape. “Beyond the Blackwall” takes that atmosphere into cyberspace itself, where the music becomes increasingly abstract. “Patri(di)ots” provides the 6th Street gang with another gritty, distorted electronic guitar identity, while “Whispers in Charter Hill” introduces an entirely different form of tension during the Peralez investigation. Its subdued bass and percussion, mysterious string writing, and electric guitar create unease without relying on overt action. Here, the threat is not physical violence but paranoia and uncertainty.
The second disc consequently becomes increasingly character-driven. “Johnny Takes the Wheel” provides a burst of humor and industrial rock-inflected energy as Johnny takes control of V's body, with the central guitar idea derived from another SAMURAI song, “Chippin' In.” “AfterWard” and “Follow the River” provide the corresponding emotional material for River Ward, while “Bakeneko” gives Goro Takemura a more personal musical setting. The latter is particularly notable for its cello writing and its association with the motif of Death, an idea that will return during the confrontation with Adam Smasher.
The Arasaka material reaches its largest expression in “The Koi and the Dragon.” The music accompanying the parade sequence expands the Japanese influence into a large-scale orchestral and percussive spectacle, with taiko-like percussion dominating the cue before the music turns toward action. It is one of the album's most expansive pieces, and an effective example of how the score can take a faction's musical identity and enlarge it to match the scale of the situation.
By this point, the album has accumulated a considerable collection of musical ideas, and the final act begins to bring them together. “No Headstone,” with its quiet guitar figure derived from SAMURAI's “Never Fade Away,” returns to Johnny's musical identity in a completely different emotional context. The aggressive rebel of “The Rebel Path” has become a dead man confronting his own legacy, and the music reflects that transformation. “Outsider No More” then completes the Panam and Aldecaldo arc before “Storming Arasaka” launches the album into its final sustained action sequence. “Smasher” provides the final burst of physical violence, while the return of the Death motif from “Bakeneko” connects the confrontation with the thematic material that had been introduced through Takemura's story.
After Smasher's defeat, however, the music changes completely. “Mikoshi Core” brings back the Mikoshi material first introduced in “The Voice in My Head,” juxtaposed with V's principal theme. The album has moved from Night City's streets to the conceptual center of V's predicament, and the music correspondingly becomes less concerned with physical action and more concerned with identity, memory, and mortality. “Never Stop Fighting” continues this transition, beginning in a chaotic mass of distorted synthesizers and cascading noise before settling into a powerful, melancholy passage in which V's theme returns prominently on cello. What began as V's musical introduction has now become a musical expression of the possibility of losing V altogether.
The final tracks bring the score's major ideas into direct conversation with one another. “Never Forget” returns to the musical world of “Never Fade Away” as Johnny ultimately takes V's body in the Temperance ending, while “Don't Slow Down, Panam” offers an entirely different resolution through the Star ending. Here the music of Panam and the Aldecaldos returns in full, dominated once again by acoustic guitar, but now carrying the emotional weight of everything that has come before. The album moves physically away from Night City and musically away from its claustrophobic electronic world, toward the open landscape of the Badlands and an uncertain future.
Finally, “Never Fade Away (SAMURAI Cover)” brings the album back to Johnny. After two discs spent transforming musical ideas associated with V, Johnny, Judy, Panam, Arasaka, and Night City into a continuous narrative, the performance provides a fitting final coda. The song is not merely a credits track placed after the story has ended. It returns to the central musical idea of Johnny's world and, in doing so, reinforces one of the score's most persistent concerns: the fear of being forgotten, and the desire to leave something behind.
Taken as a whole, the score is remarkably thematic for a game of this scale. Its musical vocabulary can be abrasive, industrial, and relentlessly physical, but it also contains some of the game's most delicate and emotionally direct writing. More importantly, the themes are allowed to change meaning as the characters themselves change. Thus, the music does not merely accompany Cyberpunk 2077's story; it follows the same journey.
Given the sheer amount of music contained in Cyberpunk 2077, it was inevitable that the game's soundtrack would eventually become something of a discography of its own. The original score was officially released in December 2020 as a two-disc, 37-track album running for more than two hours, credited to Przybyłowicz, Adamczyk, and Leonard-Morgan. But the score represents only part of the game's musical identity. Cyberpunk 2077 is also rich in licensed and original in-world music, with numerous fictional radio stations providing everything from electronic music and industrial rock to hip-hop, metal, and pop. That material has itself been released separately in the form of five volumes, as well as an album dedicated to the SAMURAI songs alone.
The expansion Phantom Liberty added another substantial body of music. Its original score, written by P.T. Adamczyk and Jacek Paciorkowski, was released separately in 2023, first as a 15-track album and later as a 19-track Deluxe Edition containing four additional tracks. The expansion also introduced new radio material of its own. Note that none of this Phantom Liberty material is included in this Renovatio Records album; this release is concerned exclusively with the original Cyberpunk 2077 main game experience and its score.
While the official original score album provides an extensive selection of the game's score, it does not necessarily reproduce the dramatic journey that a listener would experience by following V's story from beginning to end. A video game presents its music differently from a film. Cues may be triggered by player actions, repeated, interrupted, layered with other material, or encountered in entirely different circumstances depending on how a particular playthrough unfolds. The official album is therefore a collection of music from the game rather than a linear musical retelling of its story.
This Renovatio Records edition takes a different approach. The material has been selected and arranged to create a narrative arc, beginning with V's introduction to Night City, moving through the Heist and Johnny Silverhand's growing presence, expanding into the various factions and relationships that define V's journey, and eventually arriving at the assault on Arasaka and the very personal question of V's fate. Themes and musical identities are consequently allowed to return in new contexts.
The album also makes room for music that had not previously been represented on an official soundtrack release. This is particularly important because much of the game's score exists in the spaces between the more prominent cues that made it onto the original album. By incorporating additional material, the Renovatio edition can fill some of those gaps and allow certain musical ideas to develop more naturally. Rather than superseding the official soundtrack, this edition offers a different way of listening to the same enormous body of music.
In that sense, this release also represents something of a departure for Renovatio Records. After more than a decade devoted almost entirely to film music, Cyberpunk 2077 is the first video game score to receive a Renovatio edition. The transition is nevertheless a natural one. Like a film, a narrative-driven game can use music to establish atmosphere, define characters, shape dramatic momentum, and guide an audience through an emotional journey. The difference is that a game allows that journey to be experienced differently by every player. The challenge here was therefore not simply to assemble the music, but to find a sequence in which the score could function as a coherent dramatic work outside the interactive environment for which it was originally created.
That is ultimately what this edition attempts to do. Cyberpunk 2077 contains an extraordinary amount of music, much of it designed to disappear into the experience of playing the game. Heard in isolation, individual cues can be atmospheric, aggressive, beautiful, or unsettling. Heard together and in a carefully considered order, however, they reveal something larger: a musical narrative about a mercenary who begins by trying to make a name for himself and ends up confronting questions of identity, mortality, memory, and what remains of a person after they are gone.
For all its distortion, percussion, and electronic aggression, Cyberpunk 2077's score is ultimately about people: who they are, what they remember, who they leave behind, and whether they can still be themselves when everything around them is changing. For Renovatio Records, that makes Cyberpunk 2077 a fitting first step into video game music. The medium may be different, but the underlying principle remains the same: take music created to serve a larger work, reconsider its shape as a listening experience, and allow the music itself to tell the story once again.
Track listing:
|
Track Title
|
Cue Title
|
|
1. V |
0844 |
|
2. The Rebel Path |
0045, 0442, 0870 (Edited), 0738, 0442, 0377,
0138, 0806, 0862, 0798 (Edited), 0963, 0888 |
|
3. Meet Dex |
0151, 0620, 0833, 0103, 0961, 0881 |
|
4. Corpo Deal |
0833, 0346 (Edited), 0276, 1039, 0544 |
|
5. Chrome and Blood |
0106 (Edited), 0356 (Edited), 1106 (Edited),
0541, 0299 (Edited), 0755 (Edited) |
|
6. Braindance Calibration |
0361, 0958, 0449 |
|
7. Patricide |
0933, 0698, 1125, 0230, 1068, 0383, 0650,
0393 (Edited), 1138, 0762 |
|
8. Jackie’s Demise |
0241, 0576, 0799 |
|
9. The Voice in My Head |
1082, 0876 |
|
10. Cloudy Day in Japantown |
0281 (Edited), 0943, 0532 |
|
11. Tyger Claws |
0871 (Edited) |
|
12. Sugar Skull Turf |
0091 (Edited), 0847 (Edited), 0896, 0668
(Edited), 0501, 0668 (Edited), 0116 (Edited) |
|
13. Extraction Gig |
0046, 0521 (Edited) |
|
14. Scav Hunt |
0707 (Edited), 0245 (Edited), 0440, 1135
(Edited), 0577, 0208 (Edited), 0766 (Edited), 0528 (Edited) |
|
15. Finding Ev |
0727 |
|
16. AV Chase |
1134, 0685, 0213, 0486, 0074 (Edited), 0629
(Edited), 0110, 0757, 0639 |
|
17. Winds of the Badlands |
0526, 0313, 0318, 0089 (Edited) |
|
18. Digital Loa |
1123, 0257, 0492 (Edited), 0569 (Edited),
1081, 1083, 1115 (Edited), 0503, 0974, 0499, 0868 |
|
19. Beyond the Blackwall |
0539, 0079 |
|
20. Patri(di)ots |
0587 (Edited), 0567 (Edited), 0296 |
|
21. Relic Malfunction |
0604 (Edited), 0053, 0172, 0166 |
|
22. Johnny Takes the Wheel |
0080, 0478 (Edited), 1055, 0073, 0375, 0357,
0430 (Edited), 0478 (Edited), 0073 (Edited) |
|
23. Bells of Laguna Bend |
0059 (Edited), 1093, 0869, 0444, 1127 |
|
24. Thoughts Breathe Easy |
0970, 1093 (Edited) |
|
25. Ursa Major Leak |
0183, 0313, 0706, 0687, 1131 (Edited) |
|
26. Whispers in Charter Hill |
0630 (Edited), 0744 (Edited), 0235 (Edited),
0977, 0728 |
|
27. Fight the Law |
0840, 0170, 0075, 0808, 0153, 0967 (Edited) |
|
29. Juiced-Up Animals |
0953 (Edited), 0011, 1035, 0016, 0452, 0773,
0011 (Edited) |
|
29. AfterWard |
1004, 0406 |
|
30. Follow the River |
0712, 0390 |
|
31. Bakeneko |
0262, 0919 |
|
32. The Koi and the Dragon |
0645, 0071 (Edited), 0015, 0633, 0031
(Edited), 0525 |
|
33. To Hell and Back |
0158 (Edited), 0060, 0626, 0760 (Edited),
0413 (Edited), 0087 (Edited), 0867, 0626, 0760 (Edited) 1065 |
|
34. No Headstone |
0487 (Edited), 1053, 1132 |
|
35. Outsider No More |
0155 (Edited), 0706, 0367, 0638 (Edited) |
|
36. Storming Arasaka |
1043 (Edited), 0739, 0466, 0578, 0419
(Edited), 0828, 0691, 0829 (Edited), 0199 (Edited), 0841, 0666, 0352 |
|
37. Smasher |
0139, 0848 |
|
38. Mikoshi Core |
0064, 1006 |
|
39. Never Stop Fighting |
0201, 0605, 1104, 1024 |
|
40. Never Forget |
0032 |
|
41. Don’t Slow Down, Panam |
0023, 0916 (Edited), 1141 |
|
42. Never Fade Away (SAMURAI Cover) |
0072 |