The making of ‘Alan Wake 2’’s “pop songs for weirdos”
In 2010, Remedy Entertainment wrote a story within a story. Titled Alan Wake, the psychological thriller followed its titular author through the mysterious town of Bright Falls, plagued by his wife’s disappearance and a haunted novel he doesn’t remember writing. After 13 years, its long-awaited sequel Alan Wake 2 is nearly here – and during its creation, creative director Sam Lake had just one question. “Can we be more ambitious?”
The answer is a resounding yes. In Remedy’s return to Bright Falls, fictional novelist Alan Wake is on a reality-bending mission to write his way out of the nightmarish Dark Place he’s been trapped in for 13 years. Meanwhile, FBI agent Saga Anderson is investigating Wake’s disappearance and a string of ritualistic murders, but finds herself caught in a horror story of the author’s making.
Alan Wake 2 is better compared to David Lynch’s surrealist Twin Peaks series than its contemporaries in the survival horror genre. Remedy’s ambitious story can’t be contained to just one medium, as we’ve seen from its unsettling live-action scenes and ties to other Remedy games like supernatural shooter Control. Now, the studio has even teamed up with Finnish production house Fried Music to create licensed music for each chapter of Alan Wake 2. That includes the rousing anthem ‘Wide Awake’, and dark-pop track ‘Follow You Into The Dark’ – the latter of which NME can reveal exclusively below.
While ‘Wide Awake’ revolves around Wake’s imprisonment in The Dark Place, ‘Follow You Into The Dark’ explores Anderson feeling torn between her family life and job as an FBI profiler, which she excels at due to an inherited supernatural power. The lyrics for both are inspired by poetry that Sam Lake wrote. Speaking from a studio in Helsinki, Lake and members of Fried Music tell NME about the two-year process to bring Alan Wake 2’s music to life.
“It’s been a long time coming,” says Lake, pointing to Poets Of The Fall – Finnish rockers who play songs as fictional band Old Gods Of Asgard in the first game. “We’re working with Old Gods Of Asgard again [In Alan Wake 2], but we wanted to do much more and have a lot more ambition. Fried Music gave us that opportunity.”
It all began with a mysterious songwriting camp, where musicians from all over the world were flown to Finland, with no clue they would be soundtracking Alan Wake 2 until they arrived. “One of the hardest things was getting people to come here without knowing what they were signing up for, and selling this idea without telling anyone,” says Teemu Brunila, a songwriter who helped set up the camp.
The only rule, Lake told musicians at the camp, was that their lyrics had to tell Alan Wake 2’s story. Everything else was up to them – an approach that his collaborators found refreshing. “Usually you’re just chasing hit singles,” says Brunila, who has co-written and produced for the likes of Kylie Minogue and David Guetta. “It’s always up-tempo and uplifting. Nobody ever asks for haunting downtempo stuff and weird shit. If they say ‘We want it to be crazy’ and you give them something crazy, they say: ‘Why did you give me something crazy!?’”
“Style-wise, there weren’t any restrictions,” agrees Antti ‘RZY’ Riihimäki, who worked on ‘Wide Awake’. “There wasn’t anything we couldn’t do – it was really inspiring.”
“The brief that Sam gave us was so well done and coherent,” says Jurek Reunamäki, a singer-songwriter who grew up playing Remedy games. “For me, it was really easy to jump right in. The poems were really beautifully written, dark, and super cool, so it was such a treasure trove of material to start with.”
It was a highly collaborative process. In notes for ‘Follow You Into The Dark’ and its early demos, Lake shares poems he wrote about Anderson, along with themes and musical inspirations he wants to pursue. “Think Julee Cruise,” reads one line, referencing the late singer behind Twin Peaks’ theme song. As part of that back-and-forth process, ‘Wide Awake’ was originally created with a female vocalist, yet it was changed to a male singer at the request of Remedy, bringing it closer to Wake’s perspective.
“It’s really inspiring to write for such extreme characters because when you’re doing music for pop artists, they can be really extreme but they’re still more in touch with normal life and problems,” says Reunamäki. “Whereas with the characters in this game, their problems are extreme and pretty heavy. These characters are twisted, weird, and extreme. It’s such a freeing experience to write pop songs for these weirdos!”
Fried Music co-founder Jukka Immonen agrees, pointing to the day Lake introduced everyone to Alan Wake‘s universe. “It was like a moving train – everybody had to jump in,” he recalls. “When [musicians] saw what they were writing for, everybody knew their music had to be brave enough to fit the game.”
For Lake, his collaboration with Fried Music is the culmination of ideas 13 years in the making. “There was a lot of pent-up energy after trying to make this game happen [for so long],” he says. “It’s been a long, winding road to get here. Now that we’re finally able to make it, we’ve put everything on the line, pushed it, and been ambitious.”
He also believes the multimedia approach will make Alan Wake 2 more immersive. “We have all of these mediums present in our real world and lives,” he says. “We’re creating a fictional world and immersing players into it, and having these different mediums play a part in it makes it deeper and more believable. In some ways, it makes the game feel fragmented, with the things that you discover and in which order you discover them.”
With just weeks to go until Alan Wake 2 launches, the mood at Remedy is already celebratory. “This was in the making for years, and we’ve finally got it together,” says Remedy’s principal audio designer Ville Sorsa. “I’m just ecstatic that we’ve managed to pull this off.”
At Fried Music, the excitement is contagious. Riihimäki and Reunamäki, both gamers, are thrilled to have played a part in Alan Wake 2, while Brunila says the songwriting camp reignited his passion for music.
“Just before the camp, I was not loving music the way I used to,” he admits. “As a professional songwriter, I’m just chasing hits every day. I’ve had a good career, but I [was asking] ‘Have I peaked?’ Then we ran this camp, and it was amazing. It opened the floodgates and ignited my creativity again.”
As for Lake, the resulting music has been “everything [he] could have hoped for,” with seven tracks confirmed for the game’s chapters. Over 23 song demos were created in the process, and when asked if any of them could ever see the light of day, Lake plays coy. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” he says, as his peers in the studio burst into knowing laughter. For fans who have been waiting 13 years for Remedy’s return to Bright Falls, what’s a little longer?
Alan Wake 2 launches on October 27 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
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Andy Brown
NME
