Starfield is a vast space adventure. Whether you’re mainlining the story, tracking down side-quests handed out by everyone you meet, or just trying to get lost, you’re going to spend a lot of time in the cockpit of your spaceship exploring countless planets across star systems. Unfortunately, you aren’t given any tunes to help pass the time on your astro-road trip.
One of my favorite features in Bethesda’s other top RPG, Fallout, is the soundtrack, delivered to players over radio waves via the Pip-Boy strapped to their wrist. Fallout: New Vegas included iconic country musicians like Marty Robins, Harlan Howard, and Johnny Bond juxtaposed with jazz singers like Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin — a real mix of cowboy tunes for desert roaming and easy-listening for the New Vegas Strip. Fallout 4‘s selections were built around East Coast atomic anxiety Tracks like Crawl Out Through the Fallout, The End of the World, and I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire really brought to life the Cold War anxieties about the world potentially ending and absolute existential dread.
On the other hand, folks had to just deal with it and keep on living despite the danger — and that’s reflected in fun songs like Uranium Fever, Atom Bomb Baby, and of course, the incredibly horny Rocket 69. This music helped make the Fallout universe feel a little more real and lived it. Sure, there are Super Mutants knocking at your door looking to eat your family and irradiated Deathclaws roaming through your backyard, but hey, at least we’ve got some good tunes to go out to.
I know there’s absolutely no reason for Starfield to have a soundtrack filled with oddball hits from the mid-1900s. The earliest time stamp in the game is the 2050s when humanity started exploring Mars and, because civilization didn’t collapse due to nuclear warfare, there would obviously be an evolution in music and plenty of new music to listen to. But damn it, I don’t know how to play a Bethesda RPG without some old-timey jingles on the radio. Starfield‘s epic soundtrack is absolutely perfect for a player’s first time entering space or discovering a new planet. But for cruising around space, shooting down pesky pirates, and scavenging, we need big band bangers about flying saucers.
I did some initial pursuing of Spotify playlists built for Starfield, but none in existence really matched the Fallout vibe that I was looking for. Too many were going for more of a Guardians of the Galaxy vibe or included too many loosely on-theme but too modern hits like Supermassive Black Hole by Muse, Imagine Dragons’ Radioactive, and a TikTok favorite Space Girl by Frances Forever. After my internet sleuthing didn’t result in the perfect playlist, I decided to make my own.
Believe it or not, people have always been really into creating music about space. From fun alien sighting songs like Two Little Men in a Flying Saucer by Ella Fitzgerald and The Little Space Girl by Jesse Lee Turner to jazzy love songs about the moon by Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday and even an awkward sexualized hit called Rocket In My Pocket, this collection is without a doubt Fallout in space. This is by no means the perfect playlist (there are some non-spacey songs that just felt right and it isn’t as genre-diverse as Fallout usually is) but it’s a work in progress and was lots of fun to build.
Prepare your ship for launch, turn up the tunes, and let’s shoot off into space.
