Songs to Yearn For
Seven tracks for when you want to sit in the ache instead of skipping past it.
Some music is for working. Some is for lifting. This list is for neither. These are the songs I put on when I want to feel homesick for places that don’t exist. Half of them are from video games, which tracks. Nobody does yearning like a hub town composer.
1. Diplo - Everyday
Before Major Lazer, before the pop machine, Wes Pentz was a Philadelphia DJ making moody instrumental hip-hop in the Florida era (Big Dada, 2004). “Everyday” is a deep cut from that stretch. A melancholy loop that just rolls, the kind of beat tape track that makes you stare out a car window. It’s hard to believe the same guy ended up producing stadium pop.
2. Motoi Sakuraba - Majula (Dark Souls II)
The hub town theme from Dark Souls II. Majula is a crumbling cliffside village where everyone you meet is slowly losing themselves, and Sakuraba scored it with this soft, sad guitar and strings piece. The game around it is brutal. This one spot is warm. That contrast is the whole trick, and it works every time you warp home.
3. Floating Points - Sea-Watch
Sam Shepherd has a PhD in neuroscience and makes electronic music like a man who studies how brains feel things. “Sea-Watch” closes out Crush (Ninja Tune, 2019), four minutes of pastoral synth that swells like weather coming in over water. No drums. No drop. Just drift.
4. Christopher Larkin - Reflection (Hollow Knight)
Larkin scored all of Hollow Knight himself, and “Reflection” is the quiet piano piece from the still moments of Hallownest. A minute and a half, barely there. It plays when you’re resting between the hard parts, which is exactly when a game earns your trust. One of the best game soundtracks of the last decade and this little track is my favorite thing on it.
5. Yuji Takenouchi - A Moment’s Peace (Dark Souls)
Takenouchi was the sound director on the original Dark Souls, and “A Moment’s Peace” is the ambient piece tucked onto the soundtrack release. It sounds like sitting at a bonfire after barely surviving something. The whole game is about pushing through hopelessness, and this is the sound of the two minutes where you don’t have to.
6. Djrum - Reprise
Felix Manuel is a classically trained pianist who makes bass music, and “Reprise” off Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth, 2025) is where both halves show up at once. It opens as an orchestral ode, then the dubby production creeps in underneath. DJ Mag said it lands more Burial than Max Richter. That’s the exact coordinate where yearning lives.
7. Nujabes - Voice of Autumn
Jun Seba was a Tokyo record store owner turned producer who basically invented the jazz-hop sound everybody now calls lo-fi. “Voice of Autumn” opens Hydeout Productions 2nd Collection (2007), the last album he put out before a traffic accident took him in 2010 at 36. Warm keys, brushed drums, that Nujabes glow. The whole genre that came after is people trying to get back to this.
— AM