Introducing the NHL Soundtrack Project
Introducing the NHL Soundtrack Project
Reviewing every song from NHL 2002 to NHL 09 this summer
Anybody who’s followed me on Twitter for a while knows that I have an affinity for the EA NHL soundtracks from the 2000s. I’m willing to bet a lot of my followers do as well.
Two things were true about these soundtracks: they were pretty short, and if you were a hockey-obsessed kid in the 2000s you probably heard them over and over and over again.
Because the EA team chose to feature modern music (mostly rock, punk, and metal) instead of the 1980s and 1990s jock jams that actually get played in NHL stadiums, they ended up introducing a lot of young people - including myself - to contemporary alternative music and bands that ended up becoming lifelong favourites.
In Julian McKenzie’s great piece from October 2021 on the best NHL songs, EA’s music director Steve Schnur pointed out that:
“When you ask a lot of people who played NHL 2003, 2000, 2007, 2009, they remember all of these bands… I don’t even know if they remember the features that were different about the game (the) next year, but they remember the bands.”
Obviously, everyone remembers “Sweetness” and “Red Flag” and “Misery Business.” But while the limited song lists were occasionally maddening (especially when the songs you didn’t like wouldn’t stop playing), the result is that there are of lot of otherwise-forgotten bands that have at least one song that thousands of hockey fans know. Maybe they don’t even realize they know it, but they know it. But because articles or videos about these soundtracks usually focus on the more famous tracks, the hidden gems slip through the cracks.
Tom Breihan of Stereogum has an awesome weekly column called The Number Ones, where since 2018 he’s been reviewing every song ever to hit the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, telling the story of not only each individual song and artist, but in the process pop music itself. I’m not going to be quite so ambitious, but with this series, released every Wednesday throughout the offseason, I will be reviewing every licensed song that appears on NHL 2002 through NHL 09.
Why stop at 09? It’s tidy to stick to the games released in the 2000s, and NHL 10 was a bit of a change-up where they finally started including older tracks and cliché’d stadium standards.
Why do this at all? Unrestrained vanity mostly, combined with wanting to do a bit of writing that isn’t about zone entries and chance assists and expected goals.
How’s it going to work will be pretty straightforward. Each of the eight articles will focus on a specific game, reviewing each of the tracks. Depending on the song, I might have a lot to say (about the song itself, the band’s backstory, the genre etc) or not that much. I’ll also rate the song out of 10.
These reviews will all be based on my own opinion, and I’m sure plenty of my takes will be controversial. As much as I do love these soundtracks, there are plenty of songs on them that are mid or even straight-up bad, and I’m going to be honest about how I feel about them.
As a bonus, at the end of each piece I’ll be rewarding three songs with superlatives:
Most Valuable Player: The best song of the soundtrack
Aleksander Barkov Award: The most underrated song
Healthy Scratch: The one that should have been left off
This series will begin tomorrow, on July 10th, when I’ll be posting the NHL 2002 piece. Here’s the schedule:
Are you including only menu music or will I get to read about Dexter Freebish as well?
Picking a single MVP for 2004 is actually impossible.