Justice have described the GTA 6 score for the first time — and Rockstar still has not

Someone who worked on Grand Theft Auto VI's original score has finally described it. Shortly after Flower in a Hurricane went out with the launch trailer on 15 October, Justice — Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay — sat down with Jack Saunders on BBC Radio 1. GameSpot wrote the interview up around 21 October.

It is the first first-hand account of the score the game has had, and it is worth being exact about what kind of account it is. Rockstar has still published nothing. A composer talking to a radio presenter about textures is not a studio describing a system, and the gap this site has been pointing at since 17 September — what the word "dynamic" is doing in Rockstar's own copy — is exactly as open this morning as it was five weeks ago.

What the interview establishes

The eighties question, answered by the people who would know

The assumption built into most coverage of this score since August is that Vice City means 1986, and 1986 means synthwave. Augé's account, as GameSpot renders it, is that the duo never aimed at that. They did not set out to make an eighties track; the music simply ended up with "this kind of flavour". What he describes instead is a futuristic palette.

That is a small correction with a large reach, because it lines up with the game itself rather than with the marketing shorthand. Grand Theft Auto VI is not set in 1986. It is set in a present-day Vice City, and the distance between the two is a subject this site has already had to spell out once. A score that sounds forward rather than backward is the more coherent reading of what Rockstar has shown, and it is now the one the composers give.

The most quotable moment is also the most concrete. Asked about the guitar in Flower in a Hurricane, Augé's answer is that there is no guitar: it is a synth, because no guitar would produce a sound that phased and that futuristic. Kevin Parker of Tame Impala is separately credited with playing guitar on the track, so both things can be true of different parts of the same record — but the line that carries the score's intent is the one about the synth.

What the duo said about the weight of it

Augé's answer on expectation is the part every outlet led with, and it is the least informative. The duo are aware of the hype, and of how long people have waited; they describe watching "this colossus approaching" while keeping a little of their own distance from it.

That is a musician being asked an unanswerable question politely. It establishes nothing about the game, and it is reproduced here only because it is what the interview is mostly made of — which is itself a fact about how much Rockstar is letting its collaborators say five weeks out.

De Rosnay's note on the featured artists is marginally more substantial: the collaborators on Flower in a Hurricane were people the pair had long wanted to work with, assembled over time rather than cast. It says something about how the single came together. It says nothing about the other 25 unannounced tracks on Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album.

The thing this still does not settle

Rockstar's soundtrack announcement named three separate objects: the album, "the dynamic score", and the next evolution of in-game radio. It then described one of them. Six radio stations arrived on 8 October and described a second. The score has now been given a composer, a mood and one anecdote about a synthesiser, and it has still never been given a mechanism.

Nobody has said whether the score reacts to the player, to the mission, to a chase, to the time of day, or whether "dynamic" is doing marketing work. An interview about timbre cannot close that question, and it is worth resisting the write-ups that treat "Justice described the score" as though it had. The people who can close it are at Rockstar, and with four weeks to launch on 19 November they have not.

What is not confirmed

• What "dynamic" means. No description of the system from Rockstar, and none from Justice either.
• How much of the score is Justice's. No track count, no runtime, no indication of whether other composers contributed.
• The score album. Said to be coming since 15 October, with no date, no track list and no format.
• Whether any of the 34 album tracks plays on an in-game station. Unanswered since 17 September.
• The exact wording of any quotation above. These are reported renderings of a broadcast interview, and carriers differ slightly in phrasing.
• That Daft Punk were approached first. This circulates from a single leaker, no outlet on this site's list has stood it up, and neither Rockstar nor the artists have commented. Treat it as a rumour.
• A review embargo date. Still nothing official, and still nothing from a source worth naming.

Why a radio interview is weaker evidence, even when it is true

Nothing above is in doubt as reporting. GameSpot is a first-rank outlet and the segment is a matter of record. The caution is about what an interview is: a composer answering live questions about work still under embargo, describing intent rather than implementation, with no obligation to be complete and every reason not to be.

That makes it excellent on texture and useless on structure — which is precisely the inverse of what the remaining open questions need. The useful discipline, four weeks out, is to keep crediting what Justice said to Justice, and to keep the column marked "not announced" exactly as long as Rockstar leaves it empty.

Sourcing note: gamespot.com, rockstargames.com, bbc.co.uk and nme.com all fail to resolve from this writer's network, so neither the GameSpot write-up nor the broadcast itself was read or heard first-hand. The interview's existence, its interviewer, and every quotation attributed to Augé and de Rosnay above are carried as GameSpot reported them and as French and music-trade carriers reproduced them concordantly around 20–21 October. Quotation marks mark reported wording, not a transcript. The publication date of the GameSpot piece is given as "around 21 October" because the page states only a relative age. The Daft Punk claim is named only to label it unverified.