Favorite songs in FH soundtracks?

Forza Horizon Forza Horizon 5 FH5 Discussion
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With the original idea of the Horizon Festival being essentially a music festival with cars and racing, and with how many fantastic soundtracks these games have had over the years, it’s got me wondering - what are some of your favorite songs from FH soundtracks?

There are a lot of them for me, so many songs in this franchise are just fantastic. Out of the Black by Royal Blood from Forza Horizon 2 is one of my personal favorites. Great song, and feels really fitting for a game like FH for some reason.

FH3 also has a lot of bangers, with It Remembers by Every Time I Die being one of my personal favorites. Frankly, the entire FH3 Epitaph radio station is one of the best in the series, hell, the whole soundtrack for that game. The hip-hop station was the best we’ve gotten so far. Songs like It’s Tricky, Sure Shot, and X Gon’ Give It To Ya were great additions.

What about you guys?

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FH3’s Epitaph radio is the GOAT!! I always liked Touché Amoré - Palm Dreams

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Mine was the classical station. Mainly In the Hall of the Mountain King. It fits Forza.

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Palm Dreams is such an awesome song. That whole station is, really. Some of the best music in the whole series. FH5’s is okay but doesn’t come close, in my opinion.

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While we are on the subject of music…
Did you know?
Studies have shown that classical music can improve memory and reduce stress, boost overall mental wellbeing, and even improve children’s performance in school.
Also
Studies suggest that listening to classical music can improve your hearing, spatial reasoning skills and even general intelligence.

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As a die hard Alkaline trio fan i love “We’ve Had Enough” from fh3 n “Blackbird” from fh5!!

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FH4 music was unlistenable imo, other than classical and the tribe called quest song. FH3 appears to be way better based on the handful of songs you mentioned, although I never actually played it.

only song I liked on day one of FH5 was kings of the rollers burn out, but oddly enough the remi wolf and Lil Nas x songs grew on me, even though I thought they were big annoying at first. the epitaph station is good but I’ve known a lot of those songs for 20 years.

anyway, radio volume has been all the way down since 2022 began, it’s almost a feature entirely for people who put in 1 month of game play,

just give us some in-game music apps, it couldn’t cost more than licensing all these songs. then release music playlists every week. no brainer.

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I can only speak to the music is 4 & 5, given those are the titles I’ve played, but the music is pretty extensive & one of the best features of the game imo. I actually completely stopped listening to the radio a while ago just to focus more on driving, but according to the game, when I was listening, Hospital Records was my channel of choice. Some previous favorites: Deadly Valentine, Dawnbreaker, The Storm, Polaris Lessons Learned

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FH4 was a bit of a mixed bag, but definitely leaning towards the bad side. Some of XS was okay, the Greta Van Fleet song was great, Deathwish by Red Sun Rising became one of my favorites, and Rise by I Prevail was great too. XS was where I spent most of my time in that game, because frankly, the hip-hop station got significantly worse compared to FH3 and it hasn’t been the same since. Plus, I hate the Horizon Block Party radio DJ. The one from FH3 was cool. This guy isn’t.

FH5 is, uh, not really that much better to be honest. As with FH4, there are a few that I like. XS was tolerable for a while, songs like Wild Child by The Struts & Tom Morello, both Foo Fighters songs, and Trouble’s Coming by Royal Blood made the station tolerable, but eventually I gave up and just shut off the radio. Some of the songs on that station not only don’t belong there, they are just bad songs in my opinion. Do it Better, Freak, and I Wanna Connect make me want to blow my eardrums out with a tank cannon. Awful.

The situation improved slightly with the addition of new Epitaph and Mixtape, but it still isn’t great. And frankly, that song Fly by Marshmello kind of ruins Mixtape for me. Especially since that’s the one they play most frequently during races. Epitaph, like I said in the earlier post, is okay, but doesn’t come close to FH3.

I just leave the radio off in 5 at this point.

Tell me what kind of music you want to hear, and I can link the whole station from FH3 since you never got to play it and hear for yourself. It’s so much better than 4 and 5, the whole soundtrack for that game was amazing.

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Haven’t played 1 or 2 but out the other 3 games FH3’s soundtrack is my favorite. Bass arena and Pulse are spot on. Hospital Records is probably the best its ever been, Epitah Records feels like a great alternative. And it all fits really well for Australia as a location.

FH4’s soundtrack is also very fitting but to me it lacks variety, Horizon 5’s is meh overall although it has few really good songs on its list but they totally missed the mark on what festival music even is. Not necesarillly terrible but not great either. Pretty much on a steep downhil since Horizon 3.

Horizon 3: Danny L Harle - Ashes of Love, Oliver Heldens & Throttle - Waiting, iLL BLU feat. Ann Saunderson - Win, Fitz and the Tantrums - HandClap , Metrik - Hi! , Royalston - Blight Mamba, Outasight "The Wild Life ( this was in the initial drive but i’m not sure if it was on the radio)

Horizon 4: Flosstradamus Ft. 24hrs - 2 MUCH, Max Frost - Good Morning (Just Kiddin Remix) , Fischerspooner - TopBrazil (Benny Benassi & MazZz Dub Mix) , Le Youth - Clap Your Hands, Jack White - Over and Over and Over,

Horizon 5: Big Wild - Joypunks, Whethan - In The Summer (ft. Jaymes Young), Camo & Krooked – Nocturna ( sadly exclusive and not on the radio) , Urbandawn - Nimble (the hot wheels song they added with the expansion) , Bring Me The Horizon - Teardrops

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You mean about 50% of Bring Me The Horizon - Teardrops

The rest they censored.

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And now when i listen to it on youtube i know exactly where the interuption/censoring comes in :smiley: Maybe forza secretly wants us to learn the lyrics of these songs thats why they’re doing it. Its like an exercise for children :smiley: Fill in the missing words to complete the song

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I feel like fly by marshmello is the only song that plays on horizon mixtape and horizon 4’s starting screen one

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Yep. Especially for EventLabs for some reason. Fly is the ONLY thing that plays, at least that’s what it feels like. Dawnbreaker and the FH4 title screen song play pretty frequently too, but at least the former is a good song.

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FH3’s Hospital Records introduced me to drum and bass (Metrik in particular), something that I thought I wouldn’t like but it’s just so thrilling to race along to, for me at least. Been my favourite station in every FH I’ve played. I’m certainly into other genres and songs, but Hospital Records is the station of the festival in my eyes.

As for specific tracks, let me bring up my spotify:

Utopia - Metrik
Skyscraping - Fred V
She’s a Blast - Beautiful Bodies
Throw Ya Hands - Danny Byrd
Constellations - Fred V & Grafix
Ultraviolet - Fred V & Grafix

Those might be my top picks. Hard to say.

I do follow both Metrik and Beautiful Bodies thanks to Forza Horizon. Honestly, video games is probably the best way to reach me with new music. I’m too old to follow the music scene on my own these days.

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One word: “Roses”. Really like the song but of course listening to it in the game there are a lot of pauses :smile:Given the sterile E environment feel they try to project, I’ve been surprised by a few songs that they’ve added in, regardless of the censorship. Speaking of “clean” songs deployed in 4, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention “Rise” by I Prevail :metal:t2:; love that one & used for a custom track I created once.

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Horizon 1’s soundtrack is almost a complete ten out of ten for me. It’s easier to name specific songs that I don’t like from its soundtrack because it was that good. Bom Bom is a complete dud, and I am forever grateful it was never a hit in the States. Also, while the songs are good, I can’t stand listening to the Lostprophets songs anymore given what their lead singer has done. If you don’t know about Ian Watkins and you’re having a bad day, do yourself a favor and DON’T look up his Wikipedia page.

It’s harder to comment on the later soundtracks though since none of the sequels change radio stations to play specific songs for specific events, a real underrated feature of Horizon 1 in hindsight. Also, I take full advantage of being able to play Spotify in the background once a soundtrack in a game becomes stale.

Still, I’ve heard most a lot of Horizon 2’s soundtrack. Stands out off the top of my head are probably Bridge and Tunnel by Holy Ghost, Just Because by Jane’s Addiction, and the two songs by Chromeo. Best radio by far though was NinjaTune. It had great variety without sounding disconnected and muddled. Also, bonus points since NinjaTune provided the licensed songs for Blur’s soundtrack, which is also really good. Really wish NinjaTune would come back at some point.

Horizon 3’s soundtrack is probably the soundtrack I’ve listened to the least after 5’s, but this was still a very strong soundtrack. This game has easily the best version of Horizon Block Party, and two rock stations instead of one is always a plus. Standouts include Killer by Adamski and Seal, Anxiety by Bad Religion, Freedom '15 by !!!, and Get It Right by the Offspring. I could actually probably name more.

Horizon 4’s soundtrack gets more hate than it deserves, but it’s definitely a step down from the past 3 games. Horizon’s annoying “loop the song until the race ends” mechanic really ruined most of the songs I liked from this one, to the point where I honestly can’t name a favorite despite my opening statement.

Horizon 5’s soundtrack, however, is a complete mess. I turned it off within the first two hours of gameplay, but I sampled it later on Spotify to give it a chance, and I was not impressed. It’s not without it’s good songs though. About half of XS is good. I actually liked Levitating by Dua Lipa despite not listening to modern radio anymore. Other standouts include It’s Like That by Run-DMC, Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys, Rocket Fuel by DJ Shadow and De La Soul, and Straight to the Morning by Hot Chip and Jarvis Cocker.

Still, Horizon 5’s soundtrack was so much of a dud in my opinion, I ended up creating a public playlist in the same vein of a Horizon soundtrack on Spotify, and I’ve gotten at least 11 likes so far, so there’s that at least.

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I don’t think any FH will ever feature my main kind of music but Pulse in FH1 + 2 I happily had on during my time with them even when I went back to FH2 in 2021, if I had to choose one song from each probably Punching In A Dream for FH1 and Busy Earnin’ for FH2.

Can’t comment on FH3 as I only used the Groove integration in that game.

FH4, never had the radio on there either + the loading screen songs are some of the worst licensed music I have ever heard in a video game and as OTT as it is are the biggest reason I wouldn’t ever go back to FH4, any time I looked forward to racing one of those piles of trash would come on and enthusiasm quickly turned into envy for the deaf, I hate them so so so sooooo much :joy:

FH5 similar story to the previous two, no radio on.

I suppose if I stretch I could give any of FH4 + 5’s classical music the vote for their very good use as early game skill songs.

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Only played FH4 and FH5, but for me 4 easily beats 5 when it comes to soundtracks.

Pretty much only listened to Timless FM/Radio Eterna and Block Party.

FH4’s Timeless FM was basically perfection, so many all time greats, perhaps the greatest pieces of music mankind has created. The two Beetoven Symphonies, Grieg’s In The Hall of the Mountain King, Handel’s Zadok the Priest, Strauss’ Voices of Spring Waltz or Holst’s Jupiter. Just so good. Block Party included not one, but two Kendrick Lamar songs, enough said I think. And don’t get me started on Odezsa’s A Moment Apart (the intro), that’s just perfection, they absolutely nailed the entirety of the game’s intro.

FH5, overall much weaker but it too does have some amazing tracks. Berlioz’s Hungarian March is one of my favorites in Forza and you can never go wrong with Tchaikovski. Block Party, though, was a severe disappointment in 5, unfortunately.

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The reason Fly always seems to play on Mixtape is because the song shuffling is broken on that station. Every other station in the game will keep progressing through tracks even if you’re not listening to it, so if you tune to it later you’ll come in at a random point. But Mixtape is always stuck on wherever you left it last. I think Dawnbreaker is the first song on that channel, so it’ll always load up when you start the game, which means that when you switch to it during an event it’ll start playing the next song, which is Fly. It sucks, because there’s some good stuff later in the rotation that I like listening to, but I just can’t because I’m so sick of those first couple of songs.

I came in with FH3, and though I played it a lot less than I’ve played 4 and 5, there were some good tunes on there. A lot of Epitaph was great; the likes of Bad Religion and The Offspring took me back to my THPS days. I’m not much of a hip-hop fan in general but Block Party had some real bangers like Tricky, Sure Shot, and X Gon’ Give It To Ya. Honestly I think I listened to Timeless FM the most, which had some fantastic choices top to bottom. Double Beethoven, Verdi’s Requiem, Dvorak’s New World Symphony, A Night on the Bare Mountain, Also sprach Zarathustra, I mean come on. I genuinely miss that snooty Don Thompson too. I think it had my favorite main menu music as well, something about the sound of it coupled with Australia’s endless blue skies just felt like an adventure.

I think 4 was a bit weaker for me overall than 3, though there’s still plenty I enjoy. I like almost everything on XS, with La Dee Da and Safari Song being massive standouts, and Headphones is a low-key banger that always manages to get stuck in my head. Block Party again had some good stuff, like Rebirth of Slick, Wake Up, Flipping Cars, and the all-time classic Rapper’s Delight. There were some Bass Arena standouts like State of Confusion, Blackwater, and Cheat Codes, and some more good Timeless FM with Clair De Lune and Holst’s fantastic Jupiter.

5 is probably my weakest taken as a whole. A good third of the songs on XS aren’t even rock (I’m convinced that Karma the Knife isn’t so much music as a torture device), but then you get good stuff like the two Foo Fighters tracks, Wild Child, and Under the Sun. Block Party has the It’s Like That remix and Intergalactic, and Juana La Cubana is kind of a bop…but they also threw in Soy Yo from that godawful Grubhub commercial. I think I like a lot of the Pulse songs more than previous games, with The Valley of the Pagans as a standout. Unfortunately Radio Eterna is a poor replacement for Timeless, with Holst’s Mars being almost the only thing that jumps out at me. (I love Swan Lake but the clip they have is just way too short.) Mixtape would be great if the station actually worked right. The reintroduction of Epitaph was a nice shot in the arm, with It’ll Be a Long Time and Land of the Free? sticking out in particular.

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