On June 6, SEGA dropped a vocal track from Sonic Forces, which will play in the Custom Character version of Park Avenue. They never mentioned the names of the vocalists in this song, but Everett Bradley’s comeback sounds highly suspect. And for the first time since Sonic and the Black Knight, there’s a female vocalist, which leads me to believe that the group singing this song is All Ends, but it’s a little difficult to tell if it really is them because their voices are Autotuned.
There haven’t been any vocal tracks in a Sonic game since Sonic Colors, when Cash Cash frontman Jean Paul Makhlouf sang “Reach for the Stars” and “Speak With Your Heart,” the latter of which he performed with his brother, Alexander Luke. Since SEGA hasn’t actually released a musical lineup for the game other than composer Tomoya Ohtani, I’d like to list some artists who might possibly contribute their music to Sonic Forces should they be given the opportunity.
1. Crush 40
A veteran music group to the Modern Sonic series since the Golden Age of Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, blink-182, and some other popular artists that I’ll save for another time, Crush 40 is most notable for “Open Your Heart” and “Live and Learn” for Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, respectively, as well as the opening theme “Sonic Heroes” and Metal Overlord theme “What I’m Made Of” for Sonic Heroes and “His World” for Sonic ’06. Jun Senoue’s riffs in the instrumental version of “His World,” which he performed at E3 2006, made me daydream of kicking some badnik ass in a post-apocalyptic world, so it’s only appropriate that Crush 40, or Senoue himself if such circumstances arise, lay down similar rock ‘n’ rollin’ beats in Sonic Forces‘ post-apocalyptic background.
2. The Chainsmokers
Sonic Colors gave Cash Cash (or, at the very least, the Makhlouf brothers) the opportunity to prove, loud and clear, that electronic music is the genre of the 2010s, paving the way for such acts as deadmau5, Skrillex, Diplo, and more recently, The Chainsmokers. Their number one song of the summer, “Something Just Like This,” featuring Coldplay, might easily fit into the Custom Character story because the OCs in the game, like most of their creators (deviantARTists or otherwise) have “been reading books of old / The legends and the myths / Achilles and his gold / Hercules and his gifts / Spiderman’s control / And Batman with his fists” to prepare themselves for the battle against Eggman. Sadly, copyright contraints won’t allow the song to be featured in the game, so The Chainsmokers will have to conjure up a song just as epic (and steal Chris Martin for vocals again while they’re at it).
3. Twenty One Pilots
With their brand of music dubbed Schizophrenic pop (Schizoid pop, for short) by their fans and themselves to a certain extent, Twenty One Pilots bridges multiple genres into their songs, including alternative hip hop, electropop, indie pop, pop rock, electronica, and sometimes reggae. Josh Dun’s heavy drumming skills and Tyler Joseph’s motormouth make “Heavydirtysoul” something akin to a protest song–even though it’s about Joseph protesting the very idea of his fans treating him like a hero instead of their fellow human being–thus they should produce a song that protests Eggman’s sudden hostile global takeover if they haven’t written an anti-Drumpf rap already.
4. Evanescence
Shadow has more videos with an Evanescence song on YouTube than he’s had OC girlfriends–23,400 AMVs, to be precise. If SEGA was aware that most of their music fits Shadow’s edgy personality just as well as that of any other rock band, they would’ve hired Evanescence–or at the very least, lead songstress Amy Lee–to write an original song for the obsidian hedgehog’s eponymous game back in 2005. Well, it’s not too late for them to ask the band to churn out a dark melody that best describes the reason why Shadow walked back to Eggman’s side once more.
5. Nickelback
I know you were expecting Linkin Park to end this list, but Nickelback deserves that honor because their music is now more metal than Linkin Park’s has been or ever will be. “Feed the Machine,” the lead single from their ninth studio album of the same name, contains timely lyrics about resisting an all-powerful kleptocratic government, which is the plotline of Sonic Forces in a nutshell, so perhaps they should write a song about resisting Eggman turning every Mobian into robots–if that’s really his goal for world domination.
That’s my five cents on my musical guest speculations for Sonic Forces. What do you guys think?
