N Plus Infinity Times Two is the newly announced follow-up to Metanet’s beloved N++. The latter had a killer soundtrack, especially for those among us who scour Hardwax and Boomkat daily for blink-and-you’ll-miss-it vinyl pressings of austere techno. In a medium where many studios opt for chiptune or generic filmic string orchestras, it was a welcome deviation from the norm: N++ both looked and sounded like the future.
The soundtrack for N Plus Infinity Times Two will shift gears a tad. “Instead of Berlin techno,” Metanet’s Raigan Burns said during a presentation last week, “this time our main reference was UK Garage, and all the sub genres that it birthed, which [are] generally melodic, colorful, and mostly broken beat, rather than the claustrophobic, tension-laden 4/4 techno of N++”.
UK garage is an antecedent to British dubstep, whose most famous example is probably Burial or Kode9 (the later US manifestation of dubstep, i.e. stuff that sounds like Skrillex, is a whole different beast). Countless other genres have sprouted from UK garage including grime, bassline house, and future garage. To summarise: without having seen the tracklist, the soundtrack to N Plus Infinity Times Two promises to be much more sonically diverse than its predecessor.
Metanet has spent a lot of time getting it right too, especially because they’ve refused to lean on recommendation algorithms to connect stylistic dots. “Another big change is that with N++, we used recommendation algorithms on SoundCloud and YouTube to help us find new music,” Burns said. “But after 10 years of living in an increasingly algorithmically driven society, we can’t stand it anymore. So for this game we kind of went full organic, free range, and just kind of brute forced it by hand.”
He goes on: “So in the end, we spent almost 1,500 hours curating the soundtrack, which is basically two hours every evening for two entire years, listening to a few seconds each of almost half a million different songs, exploring like every back alley and sub-genre that we could find on Bandcamp to find the perfect music. The end product is something that we think is going to be truly unique in video games, with about 60 different songs from half a dozen completely different styles of modern electronic music, and it’s all exclusively from the 2020s.”
Burns promises the soundtrack will range from “flowy dreamscapes” to “intense bangers”. Representing the latter is Zorza, a producer from Metanet’s hometown of Toronto.
While we wait for N Plus Infinity Times Two’s 2027 release date, here’s the N++ playlist to provide some shelter from the foul post-Suno slopscape:
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