Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello has written a new song for Final Fantasy 14, making composer Masayoshi Soken’s dreams come true.
The MMORPG has long had a heavy influence of rock music in its score. Jason Charles Miller, lead vocalist and guitarist of the band Godhead, lent his vocals to the game, singing Endwalker’s iconic song Close in the Distance (a personal favourite), while the game’s developers themselves have formed a rock band called The Primals.
Earlier this year, I asked the game’s composer why he leans on rock music for inspiration. “Battle content really matches well with rock music,” he said. “Musically, rock is something that is easy to hype up to, and it’s also easy to understand, even though rock is not necessarily the only thing that would get you excited. I just think, as a genre, it’s very easy to get involved in.”
What’s more, Soken told me Rage Against The Machine is his favourite band, so this collaboration is very much a full circle moment.
“It all started when Jason Charles Miller told me that Soken-san, the composer of Final Fantasy 14, was a huge Rage Against The Machine fan and wanted to collaborate,” said Morello in a video message shared on social media.
“So I got down to work and wrote this track…with Beartooth, a great band. We wanted to make something super heavy and super powerful for Final Fantasy 14. I wanted to make an absolute rocking banger of a track that would mirror the energy and the potency of this game.”
Soken shared the post himself, calling it “nonsensical” – he’s clearly very excited.
“To write it in an easy-to-understand way? Suddenly, a song gets sent from my top fave, and it gets implemented in the game – that’s the flow, and even as I’m writing this now, it’s totally nonsensical!” he said (via machine translation).
The track, called Everything Burns, will feature in the Arcadion battle arena. It’ll also be available on streaming services from 17th December. Before then, you can hear a snippet in both the social posts and trailer above.
The next update for Final Fantasy 14, Patch 7.4, will be added on 16th December. Called Into The Mist, it will lift restrictions on glamouring outfits in addition to extending the game’s story.
