GTA VI's Soundtrack Is a 34-Track Atlantic Records Album, Out the Day the Game Lands

Rockstar Games and Atlantic Records announced Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album on September 17: an official soundtrack launching November 19, alongside the game itself. It runs to 34 tracks billed as original, and six of them went live on streaming services the same day.

The six are Yung Lean's "That's It" with Future and Metro Boomin; Travis Scott's "RHYNO," produced by Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo; "Sexy Magic," a collision of CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso, PinkPantheress, Fred again.. and Etienne de Crécy; Morgan Wallen's "Last Thing You Need"; Rauw Alejandro's "Macacoa 2000"; and Keith Richards' "Bright Lights, Big City."

There is no genre logic to that run of six, which is the interesting part. A Rolling Stone; a country headliner; a reggaeton star; a Swedish rapper with Future and Metro Boomin guesting; Travis Scott produced by half of Daft Punk; and a four-way between an Argentine duo, a British pop singer and two dance producers from either side of the Channel. No radio programmer would build that sequence. It is a map of who Rockstar thinks is playing — audiences that overlap almost nowhere except in front of the same screen.

The album's own billing is about place rather than personnel: 34 tracks that "capture the electric energy of Grand Theft Auto VI's world of Vice City and Leonida," from what the official site calls "a genre-defying roster." That is the pitch for the game as much as the record — the series has always sold a version of Florida, and the music is doing a share of the set dressing.

"Original" is doing some work in that billing, mind. Richards' contribution is a cover: "Bright Lights, Big City" is a Jimmy Reed blues song from 1961, played here with more force than Reed gave it. New recordings, then, rather than 34 new compositions.

Priced like a record, not a bonus item

Atlantic is selling it as a release in its own right. Pre-orders opened at $19.98 for the CD, $49.98 for vinyl and $124.98 for a limited edition — collector pricing, on a soundtrack for a game that hasn't shipped.

Rockstar has put music out under its own name before, and Grand Theft Auto's radio stations are still the best-known music feature in games: other people's records, sequenced with real taste, teaching a generation which songs went with which decade. What's different here is the size of the thing and the company it keeps — 34 tracks through a major label, landing the same day as the game rather than trailing it by a week.

Six songs out of 34 is a sixth of the record, and Rockstar hasn't said when the rest of the tracklist lands. What's public already tells you the ambition, though. November 19 was a date on the games calendar. It's on the music one now too.