Bringing Fun and Danger to Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League's Score

Air-Edel sits down with Rupert Cross, who co-composed the music for the latest Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League video game released at the end of February, and the Season 1 pack which came out on the 28th March in time for Easter. Rupert chats more about the project.

Q> In Rocksteady’s latest game, Suicide Squad members Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang and King Shark must take on an impossible mission to save Earth and kill the world's greatest DC Super Heroes, The Justice League. How did you start on this project?

Rupert> In 2019 I met Nick Arundel (audio dir. and co-composer of SSKTJL) to talk about the game. In line with the protagonists’ backstory and the concept of Brainiac's control over the JL, Rocksteady were interested in the idea of a corrupted rock band. 

Together we shaped a sound that captured the fun and danger of the Squad. They’re not superheroes, they’re neither slick nor polished, and we wanted to convey that with the score whenever they were on screen.

Q> How did the sound world come together?

Rupert> We spent a long time of time R+Ding. We knew drums and bass were going to be vital to the Squad sound and were extremely fortunate to get Adam Betts and Chris Hill into our Squad band. During recording at Air, musicians played together in the same room to get everything locked in which was crucial to the groove.

A fundamental part of the score is the distortion, which in its purest sense was how we characterised corruption. 

For the guitars and synths I would run everything through a collection of pedals before delivering to Fi Cruickshank (in-game recording and mixing engineer) at Air Studios. Fi would run the lot through their family of Thermionic Culture Vultures multiple times. Deep in the R+D we were comparing different valves on different units.

For the first cues I principally used four pedals for colour - one for each member of the squad: the Big Muff whose size reminded me of King Shark, Smart Belle’s Belle Fuzz for Harley Quinn, Gamechanger Audio’s Plasma Pedal, whose lightning reminded me of Boomerang’s traversal attack, and Amptweaker’s Tight Fuzz Pro, a precision fuzz that reminded me of Deadshot. I kept adding more and more distortion pedals to mix up the sound. The Interstellar Overdriver Deluxe by Death by Audio did a lot of heavy lifting for overdrive. I recorded guitar post pedals through a Kemper using a Marshall Plexi profile as a pedal platform.

It was important to me to have a high register punchy bass sound to really cut through, so I mocked up everything with my Fender Jazz bass. Chris (Hill) brought in this amazing Ernie Ball Stingray to replay the lines, recording though his own collection of bespoke pedals and his vintage Ampeg.

Lastly, we recorded the LCO, running them through a bunch of effects to really twist and warp their sound. Essentially, we didn’t want anything to sound pure or untainted.

Q> The game is open world. How did the music grow to meet the scale of the game?

Rupert> Well, we wrote a lot of music! Rocksteady were great at anticipating the needs of the game and kept coming to me with a shopping list for the Squad.  

The scale and importance of the boss fights required upping the ensemble size from just strings to full orchestra. For the Lantern boss fight I wanted conflict between orchestra and distorted synths to represent the battle between the JL and the Squad. The drama of the fight allows the orchestra real moments to flourish. Nick had already written the Flash boss fight in 7/8 which I thought was cool so I replicated this. 

Q> The score twists and grows in game based on the players actions. How did you implement music into the game?

Rupert> Instead of just dropping and adding stems based on the players actions, Rocksteady had a fascinating idea to get our drummer and bassist to record different intensities of performance within the same tracks, meaning when the music drops and builds based on your actions, the musicians do too. Your actions as a player create not just structure but texture as well. Rocksteady handled all implementation.

Q> March 28th sees the first Season drop with the Joker joining the team. How does his sound world differ to the Squad?

Rupert> Well, he is part of the Squad so we didn’t want something completely different, but he is such an iconic character we obviously needed to inject his DNA into the score.  

I was taken by the floating green gas encompassing his world and believed this could be presented with a choir moving like bird murmuration. I ran that through a similar chain of pedals as before so it sounds like the synths are singing. I liked the twisted fairground feel of his world, so composed fairground music chopped up with the Waldorf Quantum and played back in fits and spurts, messing around with pitch and speed algorithms. Then we got the band back together.