Justice scored GTA 6, and the new single "Pusher" has Gesaffelstein on it

Rockstar's made it official: Justice wrote the score for GTA 6. The French duo's soundtrack is called Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score, and the second single from it, "Pusher", features Gesaffelstein.

If you've heard "Flower in a Hurricane" from the launch trailer, the one with SZA, Tame Impala and King Gizzard, that was the first single. So the music you've been hearing over Rockstar's footage this autumn is the actual game music. It wasn't a licensed trailer song.

It changes as you play

Rockstar's Newswire calls the score adaptive, with "expansive compositions all dynamically tuned to the different ways players engage" with Vice City and Leonida through Jason and Lucia's story. In plain terms, the music reacts to what you're doing, the way Red Dead Redemption 2's score swelled when a chase kicked off and dropped back when you rode off.

That's a big job for a band best known for albums and festival sets. GTA 5's score was a team effort between several producers. Handing the whole thing to one act is a different approach, and it means Justice's sound is going to be all over the parts of the game that aren't the radio.

The vinyl and the dates

The physical release is on 11 December, about three weeks after the game. Rough Trade has it up for preorder at $59.99 for a clear triple vinyl (indie shops only), $54.99 for black triple vinyl and $21.99 for a 2-CD set.

The track count's a mess right now. Rough Trade says thirty tracks, while a digital listing shows fifty entries. Our guess is the streaming version carries short cues and stingers the vinyl leaves off, but that's a guess, and Rockstar hasn't said.

Don't mix it up with The Album, either. That's the separate thirty-four track record of original songs by various artists, and it comes out on launch day, 19 November.

So what about Daft Punk?

Last week a music leaker claimed Rockstar had tried to get Daft Punk back together for the game and that Justice were the second choice. That part's still unconfirmed and probably always will be. What we know now is that Justice got the whole score and pulled in Gesaffelstein, which is about as close to that sound as you can get without a helmet.

"Pusher" is out now. If the score works anything like Rockstar says, the first time you hear it properly will be in a chase, not on Spotify.