RHL '23 Soundtrack

October 9, 2022 by Hieronymous MacMillan

Alright, so I'm going to be honest. As much as I enjoyed posterizing Jakub Skarek for his achievements, or lack thereof, last season for the cover of "RHL '23" I had ulterior motives. 

If you've followed along with any of my articles, you'll know that I like to add music clips and YouTube links here and there. And if you've played any iteration of EA's NHL series over the past decade plus, or any video game really, you'll know that it has a built in soundtrack. 

Now if you're like me, you've spent countless hours in Franchise or GM mode and what that means is you've also spent those same hours on the menu screen. Where you hear the same songs play over and over and over and........
This can be both a blessing and a curse. Mostly a curse because no one wants to listen to "insert song here" play 40 times during the course of an evening. But on those rare occasions you stumble across a song or band that you may have never heard before. For me, this happened when I was playing NHL 2004 and this little ditty came on...

It wasn't too long after this that I went out and picked up a copy of Brand New's "Deja Entendu (along with Jet's debut album "Get Born" after seeing their performance on Saturday Night Live). Given my musical tastes, it's very likely I would have stumbled across Brand New sooner or later but it just so happened that NHL 2004 was the catalyst. 
So what I wanted to do was create a soundtrack for RHL '23. I didn't really put any constraints on it in terms of genre. What I wanted to do was capture the feel of games that have come before. Songs that catch you when you first hear it and then you despise after the 9000th time. 

Some names may look or sound familiar. Protest the Hero has featured on NHL 07("Divinity Within"), NHL 09 ("The Dissentience") and NHL 2K9 ("Goddess Gagged"). Alexisonfire had "Young Cardinals" on NHL 10. Even one of my all-time favourite bands Coheed and Cambria, who I unapologetically added in my playlist, has cotributed a track before with "The Running Free" on NHL 09 and as recent as NHL 23 ("The Liars Club").
You might look at some of the names and think "who the hell is this?". But that's kind of the whole point and the fun in the process. Hearing songs from band you never knew existed before and going down a rabbit hole of sorts. 
Some of these tracks are heavy in my everyday rotation, others are from artists that I hadn't heard of until working on putting this all together. There are 9 tracks from Aussie musicians, which may not scream hockey, but I'm a victim of circumstance.

Next time you're editing your RHL lineup, playing some 'Chel or just sitting around and want to listen to some music, I hope you'll give it a listen and find something that you'll remember like I did all those years ago. 

Let me know what songs you've enjoyed from the previous incarnations of the NHL series or what songs you liked from my playlist in the comments.