few hours after Night City Wire Episode Two launched onto Media platforms, Loudwire posted a lengthy article going over Refused's collaboration with CD Projekt Red in order to bring Johnny Silverhand's legendary band, Samurai to life. Loudwire speaks to Dennis Lyxzen, Vocalist of Refused, who shared his experiences delving into the Cyberpunk 2077 world, discussing some of the challenges and expressing his fascination for taking on this new musical experiment with the band. You can read the full article here, but I've taken a few paragraphs from the large article to give you all an idea of what it contains, just incase you don't feel like digging in to deep, Although I highly recommend its most definitely worth a full read. You can check out the whole interview here.
How did you first come to be involved with the Cyberpunk 2077 game?
It’s pretty insane given the level of hugeness with this whole project. They got in touch with me on an Instagram DM, which is pretty wild. Someone wrote me, and I get a lot of messages, and someone was like, ‘Hey, we’re doing this video game. Would you want to be a voice in the game or would you want to be part of this?’ I’m not a gamer, so I just passed it on to my management and they were like, ‘Holy shit, this is a huge deal.’
So then we said yes and we started talking and they wanted to do this band Samurai in the game kind of based on Refused. So we just figured what better way than to just have Refused be Samurai. We ended up doing that and it was pretty awesome.
What were you shown in advance? Were you given any notes or shown any of the gameplay?
The composer and director of the game had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted the music to be like, which was kind of like a futuristic version of Refused. But when writing the lyrics and coming up with the themes for the songs, they did send me a bunch of the Cyberpunk material and showed us some ideas behind the game and the book and everything, so I had to dig in a little bit and learn about the Cyberpunk mythology and understand what that was all about so [I] could write the lyrics to it.
Usually when you write lyrics, you write it from your perspective. You write it from stuff you see in this world, but this time we had to write stuff that was definitely not of this world, so there was definitely a different approach to it because the composer knew what he wanted out of the band.
Given our background and our agenda and our political ideas and our DIY attitude toward how we approach music, I think it just made a lot of sense to connect us to Samurai.
Since you recorded the music a while ago, I’m assuming you’ve seen how the game looks and how the music fits in. What’s your response to what you’ve seen?
It looks pretty amazing. It’s such an ambitious game and the scope of it is so vast with the whole mythology around it. Plus there’s so much excitement around the game. It’s interesting to see how as a band, Refused, there’s like a new song, a new single and you know the impact that that will have. But then you put out a song as a fictitious band in a game and it’s amazing how huge that impact is. It’s quite fascinating.
I was in Warsaw with my other band INVSN and we went to the CD Projekt Red headquarters and they showed me stuff from the game, how they incorporated the sounds and I got to see how they composed the music. It’s pretty amazing in how huge that is and how cool it is to be part of something that is going to be a pop cultural landmark. That’s pretty awesome.
Read More: Refused Record Music for 'Cyberpunk 2077' Video Game Band
