The music from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is out on its own. Two albums arrived after the show's Netflix debut on October 20, splitting the release in the way that has become standard for anime: a full score for the people who want the cues, and a shorter song album for everyone else.
The score, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 (Original Series Score), runs 39 tracks and is composed by Tsuneo Imahori. The companion album, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 (Original Series Soundtrack), holds eight original songs written for the series. Both are on the usual streaming platforms.
Who wrote what
Imahori is the name to know here if you only know the show. His credits go back to Trigun, where his guitar-driven score did as much for that series' mood as the direction did, and they include Hajime no Ippo and Gungrave. That is a composer with a specific signature: rock instrumentation, loose rhythms, and a habit of letting a motif sit rather than resolving it.
The song album is a different kind of record. Eight tracks, eight sets of hands:
- Rico Nasty, "You Can't Run From Me"
- DOUDOU, "A Rusty Dream"
- Corbin, "Worth It"
- BIJI, "Boya"
- Petite Meller, Piernikowski, Kalman Chodakiewitz and Eli Shiffman on the remaining tracks
Petite Meller is also the voice on the ending theme, "Watson," while the opening theme is The Cure's "10:15 Saturday Night." Those two sit outside the albums, which is worth knowing before anyone goes looking for them.
Why two albums
Splitting score and songs is not a marketing quirk. A 39-track score is a listening experience built for people who want to sit with the atmosphere of a show, and it needs room. Songs written for individual scenes get buried when they are sequenced between twenty minutes of ambient cues.
The first Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime had Akira Yamaoka as composer, and its soundtrack lived on the strength of one song in particular, Rosa Walton's "I Really Want to Stay at Your House," which outgrew the show and became its own thing online. A sequel carries the pressure of that. Releasing the songs as their own album is one way of saying the new material is meant to be heard, not just heard over a scene.
What the show is
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is a ten-episode series from Studio Trigger and CD Projekt Red, created by Bartosz Sztybor with Kai Ikarashi directing. It is set in 2078, roughly a year after the events of Cyberpunk 2077, and it follows Roman Carax, a twelve-year-old filmmaker in Night City who documents the people around him and gets pulled into their problems. The cast includes Momoka Terasawa, Akari Kitō, Kentaro Tone and Koki Uchiyama. Hideo Kojima also turns up in it, reprising his Cyberpunk 2077 character, which tells you how much the show enjoys its own references.
Imahori's job is different from a conventional sequel score. The show is a standalone story with new characters, so there is no library of themes to quote. The music had to establish Night City again without copying Yamaoka's version of it, and the guitar-forward approach is a clean break from the synth-heavy palette most cyberpunk soundtracks reach for.
How to listen
Start with the song album if you want the obvious hooks, then move to the score for the parts of the show that stayed with you. The score is the more interesting listen of the two, because 39 tracks is enough room for Imahori to build something across a full album and not just hit a mood eight times.
Both albums are streaming now, and neither requires a Netflix subscription.
Source: Anime Corner.
Featured image: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 promotional art, via Anime Corner.
