A great soundtrack is vital to a great gaming experience. With equal amounts of musical and environmental variety and consistency, and not one mediocre track throughout the game, the enchanting music ofHollow Knightis crucial to its mystical, tragic story and melancholic, dreamlike atmosphere.
Many fans will agree, however, some tracks stand out among the others, playing major parts in creating the most memorable moments of the game.
13Mantis Lords
As well-placed as it is iconic, the Mantis Lords boss fight theme couldn’t suit its namesake boss better. The Mantis Lords aren’t a trio to trifle with, and keep you thinking on your feet. Just when you think you’ve got the hang of their patterns, they leap to amp up the pressure.
Fear not. You won’t fight all three mantises at once. This is a two-phase fight, with the first against one mantis, and the second against a duo.
Quick-paced, fluid, yet sophisticated and fit for lords' courts, this ornate piece shines the spotlight on the harpsichord like no other track in the game. Mantis Lords manifests that exact sense of urgency players feel while fighting for their Knight’s life, and encourages respect for this regal boss.
12Hornet
An earlier boss fight many encounter in Hollow Knight, Hornet’s theme is as intense as this character deserves it to be. In conjunction with her music, Hornet’s fight is reminiscent of a dance. Fittingly, her song just about entirely features string instruments, as well as a symmetrical bass line, as she weaponizes strings on her needle and explosive attacks. The fight and its theme intertwines elegance with intensity.
You must defeat Hornet twice in the course of the game to achieve the journal entry for her.
Hornet, the princess protectorof Hallownest and future lead character for Silksong, is a boss that punishes overconfidence and impatience, demanding attentiveness and willingness to learn. Protective but not malicious, the tone of Hornet’s theme works early on in the game as a storytelling device for her character.
11Hollow Knight
The main theme of Hollow Knight makes for a perfect introduction to this game, artfully setting up the atmosphere for Hallownest kingdom and foreshadowing the tragedy and truth the Knight is journeying to unravel. This is the song that plays on the main menu of the game, starting out with a calm, melancholic piano melody that swiftly merges with a pensive violin.
The track also showcases Christopher Larkin’s innovative style and approach as a composer. With optimistic, almost happy notes and chords appearing in some instances throughout the short piece, evoking feelings of bravery, innocence, and a dreamlike state between the melancholy and pensiveness of the music at once. Multiple songs on the game’s soundtrack derive their essence from this
10Radiance
The main game’s final boss theme, which couldn’t be more fitting for Hollow Knight’s finale and ultimate battle. With a striking choral element that makes a strong entrance and continually adds emphasis to the highly orchestral and elaborate track, which truly captures the terrifying radiance and the fearfulness of this opponent.
Starting out aggressive, full of rage, and terror, and building up to increasingly composed, sublime, and heroic-sounding as the finality of the game plays out, Radiance is a perfect theme to the showdown fight between an obscure and lonely Knight battling the godlike, vengeful scourge of Hallownest.
The Radiance is the scornful heart of the infection that brought Hallownest to its ruin, the ancient enemy and polar opposite of the Void, acting as the promise of a destructive, terrifyingly blinding light to the insects of the kingdom. This is the truth that the Knight sought to uncover, and makes for an unforgettable boss.
9Queen’s Gardens
Magical, graceful, lovely, isolating, and whimsical all at once, this short track from the game is highly underrated. Queen’s Gardens can be heard in the area it’s named for. The Gardens contain a grand greenhouse, intricately decorated gates, columns, and paths, and is a lush, vividly green collection of plants and thorny vines that have been left to grow wild and rampant, where hostile insects now roam.
Visiting the White Lady in this area grants you the left half of the Kingsoul Charm.
The Gardens' theme communicates to players the beauty the place held within its gates, as well as the underlying sadness of its story. Once the home of the Mosskin Tribe, the Gardens found their way into the hands of Hallownest’s late queen and became a place of safety and futile solace for her.
This area’s ambient music is surely successful in giving voice to the abandonment that has spread across the garden, as well as its once well-kept grounds and unique, now uncontrollably growing beauty.
8Nightmare King
One of the game’s DLC tracks, and possibly one if not the most well-known and widely loved of Larkin’s Gods & Nightmares album. Nightmare King is one of Troupe Master Grimm’s themes inHollow Knight’s Grimm Troupe Quest, specifically the theme for Grimm’s dream version.
Notoriously one of the more difficult and unforgiving battles of Hollow Knight, and clearly heavily inspired by vampire folklore, Grimm’s appearance of dark, dignified and almost bat-like, works fantastically well together with his theme and combat to make the most of this motif.
Vicious, dripping with brutality, organ-heavy, with ominous choral sections and sonorous drums, Nightmare King Grimm’s standout theme succeeds in fully delivering the darkness, ruthlessness, and kingliness of this boss.
7The White Lady
Exquisite, delicate, sophisticated, yet evoking feelings of remorse and quiet despair, The White Lady is a particularly memorable track in Hollow Knight, and is accompanied by the horrific tragedy of Hallownest’s Queen. Played upon finding the self-imprisoned queen, the song is entirely composed of a solitary harp melody.
Ashamed and plagued by guilt for the suffering that befell her Vessel children when she and the Pale King tried to halt the infection of the Radiance, the White Lady succumbed to despair and solitude. And her harp song perfectly echoes her quiet suffering and grief.
6Dirtmouth
While widely recognized, Dirtmouth likely remains among the most underrated tracks of Hollow Knight, and is an excellent example of how a soundtrack is used to create atmosphere and identity in a game, and how it can be an effective and essential tool for storytelling.
The track is heard in Dirtmouth, the Fading Town, a once lively town on the outskirts of the Hallownest kingdom, that has become desolate and silent as the neighboring kingdom has fallen deeper into decay.
Building on the structure of the game’s main theme, Dirtmouth once again sees the ambient piano section, consisting largely of soft arpeggios in this track, intertwining with a slow, melancholic violin melody. Soothing yet subtly foreboding, keeping a slow but fluid pace, Dirtmouth as a theme makes for ideal background music in its dimly lit location, creating a sense of peace and safety even with its gloomy, lonely sound.
5Sealed Vessel
The theme of Hollow Knight’s deeply tragic penultimate boss, the Hollow Knight, a character fundamental to the meaning of the Knight’s journey and the events of the game’s story as a whole. And rightfully, Sealed Vessel is tremendously emotional, despairing, passionate epic, possibly the most dramatic song on the soundtrack, and climactic but mournful at once, giving a sense of inevitability throughout the fight.
Singular melodies of violin and cello unite on this track to lead in harmony, the pace alternating as the fight progresses, with desperation becoming greater, stakes rising higher, and the Hollow Knight’s anguish becoming clearer.
One of the White Lady’s and Pale King’s children, the Hollow Knight was the Vessel chosen to try and contain and stop the Radiance’s infection altogether. This plan failed, and the Vessel remained locked away, the kingdom ruined. Sealed Vessel is the devastated lament of a strong but long-tormented heart.
4City Of Tears
One of the most highly praised and admired songs of the entire Hollow Knight soundtrack, City of Tears marks a special moment for many Hollow Knight players, and a crucial point in the game as well, making it a defining track for this indie masterpiece.
City of Tears is the Capital City of Hallownest, and often marks a revelation for players, that the world they have entered is far more than an interconnected series of tunnels of insects.
Starting out with gentle, refined, consistent ostinati complemented and guided by an accompanying bold yet melancholy melody and mellow bass line, coming together to create a sound that is both proud and emotional, as well as a flawless atmosphere for this city’s perpetual rain, gloom, its Gothic architecture.
But the way the music rises, swells, and carries as the Knight ventures further into the City of Tears swiftly and effectively communicates to listening players the idea of how grand the Hallownest kingdom really is, the fact and scale of its culture, history, and the complex lives and emotions within its walls.
