It’s not often that a band returns to soundtrack the same game nine years after its release — then again, most games aren’t No Man’s Sky. Once demoed on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and at splashy E3 press conferences, in 2016, No Man’s Sky was heralded as gaming’s future. And it was all made possible by the procedural generation that spawned its vast, sci-fi universe.

Nearly a decade later, as post-rock band 65daysofstatic returns to re-score the ever-evolving game, generated content is no longer the exciting futurism it once seemed. With AI slop flooding social media and AI-generated bands sneaking their way onto Spotify, the tech that once powered gaming dreams is slowly becoming a dystopian nightmare.

“It’s just capitalism, isn’t it?” says 65daysofstatic’s Paul Wolinski. “It’s ruining everything. It’s all these CEOs who don’t understand the difference between art and content.”

That’s where Journeys, a defiantly human soundtrack that stands firmly against the rise of the music-generating machines, comes in. Working alongside Hello Games’ audio director, Paul Weir, Wolinski has spent the last year transforming a series of abstract, unreleased soundscapes into full-fledged songs. Once intended as pieces to be infinitely reassembled by No Man’s Sky’s algorithm, the two Pauls strove to reimagine these ethereal bleeps and bloops into something that sounded altogether more human. The result is a 32-track, four-LP album that combines 65daysofstatic’s reworked soundscapes with original compositions from Weir.

“For this record, we were much more interested in turning all of that infinite stuff into something more intentional — something bespoke and artisan,” says Wolinski. Where the initial soundtrack Music for an Infinite Universe’s pounding drums and swelling guitars match the highs and lows of jetting off into space, Journeys is an altogether eerier creation, channeling the quiet sense of foreboding of arriving on an unknown planet, the initial score’s optimism replaced by a more unknowable reality.

“When we first started this, I assumed it would be just remixing our old selves,” says Wolinski, “but most of the soundscapes didn’t provide an origin point for an actual song at all… It was much harder, more mysterious.” Luckily, 65daysofstatic had an ethereal expert on hand: Weir.

“We were much more interested in turning all of that infinite stuff into something more intentional”

While the band went off experimenting with procedural generation in their audio / visual live shows, No Man’s Sky continued to grow and evolve, and it needed the music to match. “I didn’t want to sound like a fake 65daysofstatic, you know?” says Weir, as he sat at his synth, picking up where the band of static left off. “I’m a sound designer as much as a composer, and so that’s brought in quite a lot of abstraction into some music. There’s a lot of strange noises!”

As 65daysofstatic’s prog-laden epics combine with Weir’s synth-led ambience, the result is closer to a Philip Glass score than a noise-drenched post-rock record. It’s a marked evolution from what came before, one that matches No Man’s Sky’s journey from rocky launch into the sprawling sci-fi epic that it is today. “It’s a funny old relationship,” reflects Weir, on working on the same game for 14 years. ”We’re both constantly going, ‘All right, enough already, time to move on!’ and then simultaneously delighted by its continued strength and success.”

Image: Laced Records

It’s not just Hello Games who has enjoyed the fruits of No Man’s Sky’s success. Of 65daysofstatic’s top-played songs on Spotify, nine of them were written for the game. No Man’s Sky songs have become integral parts of 65daysofstatic live sets, these compositions living on outside of the game in a way soundtracks rarely do. “To us, it has always been a 65daysofstatic record as much as the No Man’s Sky score,” says Wolinski. “We’ve been lucky enough to be associated with a few big things in our career, but to be tied to something that has had such a massive cultural impact, it’s just a lovely feeling.”

Now with Journeys out in the wild, could 65daysofstatic and Weir perform the music live together? “We wouldn’t rule out potentially doing something on the 10th anniversary in some shape or form,” teases Weir.

Much like the vast transformation No Man’s Sky has undergone since launch, the world’s relationship with technology has completely changed since 2016. When Wolinski first learned about the possibilities of using procedural generation to rearrange music, he tells me it became something of an obsession, inspiring live-coded, improvised audio / visual tours for the band, 2019’s algorithmic album Decomposition Theory, and even a PhD. “No Man’s Sky definitely sent us off in this other direction,” smiles Wolinski. “And I’m really happy that it did.”

“Who cares if computers can make music? That’s not what music is.“

Yet in 2025, Wolinski believes generative tech’s name has been sullied by prompt-based dirge. “We came back to this project being very against the associations between generative systems and AI slop,” says Wolinski. “​​I think there’s a huge difference between that and No Man’s Sky’s generative systems … Now it’s all about making more content to churn through, just to keep people’s attention for a few seconds. The whole thing is miserable.”

“With No Man’s Sky, it’s all our music, everything is handcrafted. The computer does not create anything — what it does do is rearrange it,” explains Weir. Despite the clear difference between an algorithm piecing together human-made music and one simply prompting it into existence, with hardworking human artists currently fending off impersonation from AI impostors, the Pauls felt compelled to push back against computer-led composition.

Journeys, then, is more than just an album; it’s humans taking a stand against the rise of the musical machines. “Who cares if computers can make music? That’s not what music is,” says Wolinski. “The moving of the speakers to generate sound waves is such a tiny part of what gives music meaning. It’s all about the social relations around [it], the human dialogue between one person and another, even if they never meet. This is what art is — and it’s why generative AI completely misses the point.”

Journeys* is out now on streaming platforms and vinyl.*

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• Tom Regan