Music for a Flying Whale

Whale Trail is an endless flyer about a whale who has learned to fly. This is the entire premise, and ustwo—the studio behind it—had the good sense to ask Gruff Rhys, frontman of Super Furry Animals, to score it. The result sounds exactly like you’d hope: melodic, slightly outside the usual dimensions, warm in the way that Rhys’s best work with SFA always was. It fits the whale perfectly. The whale doesn’t need an explanation for its flight, and neither does the music.

There’s a long tradition of musicians taking game work seriously—treating it as a creative commission rather than a licensing opportunity—and the work sounds different when that’s the case. Rhys wrote a full album for this. You can tell. It plays like music that knows where it’s going, even when the whale doesn’t.