The soundtrack dives straight towards the bottom, allowing no transition to ease us into a new flow, a mercilessness that permeates the whole album as the player commits ever-increasing acts of cruelty. Suddenly, at its end, comes the terrible neck-snapping movement of the crash in the form of M|O|O|N’s “Hydrogen”, hard techno drilling speed back into the surface of the hazy daydream, sweeping its uncertainty away with a beat that aims directly at the throat and doesn’t let go.
Everything moves at the pace of a desert dune, accumulating millennia of noise and sand that ultimately fade away into the distant light of a setting sun. It is like falling into a sun-drenched abyss, a car spiraling out of control in the midst of a warm and quiet day. The soundtrack begins with a sleight of hand: Sun Araw’s “Horse Steppin” drags like a tape lost in delay, an unintelligible groan strewn along a slow, slow rhythm.
Inspired by the movie Drive, it thrived in the retro with all its implications of nostalgic bad dreams, bringing in a diversity of artists with backgrounds in experimental music, EDM, synthwave, and videogame music, pushing the aesthetic to its limits. It did so mainly by means of rhythmical collage: your eyes dart, your hands move, establishing patterns in time, marking their passing with a punch, the firing of a gun, the crash of broken crystals and busted doors. Not only did it aid spawning the now common inclusion of synthwave and retro-EDM tracks in indie productions, it also achieved a rare integration of music and play mostly reserved to ‘music games’.
Hotline Miami (2012) is an utterly violent game enamored with the question of agency as well as gaming’s long-standing depictions of different kinds of aggression, and it has one of the most powerful soundtracks in the medium’s recent history.