In relation to discussion above, recent polish podcast with Marcin Przybyłowicz explains some of the decisions they made regarding the soundtrack of Cyberpunk 2077.
While coming up with the music direction, he was listening to music in a popular Cyberpunk media like Blade Runner and Deus Ex, but also checking out on the Internet what kind of music people associate with Cyberpunk, which was of course synthwave, but ultimately he decided that those didn't really fit well artistically into their vision of Cyberpunk. For the synthwave, he felt like this association is purely based on 80's nostalgia and nothing else really.
While Marcin really likes Vangelis music in Blade Runner, he felt like it gives out the vibe of something magnificent and massive, while he describes their vision of Cyberpunk as having a lot more "rust, dirt between it's teeths and scars on it's limbs". It's not a philosophical Cyberpunk, but rather "grounded" Cyberpunk, meaning that it's not really about characters wondering whether androids dream of electric sheep, but about people who face an issues like "I've been mugged on the street and someone harvested my cyberlimb away to sell it on the black market, so now I can't do my job, which means I need to find some way to solve this problem quickly or else I won't have money to survive another day".
This kind of street level stuff, which was also the focus of Cyberpunk 2020. To capture that street level feeling of the setting they decided to take their inspirations from the 90's techno, rave and electronic music, as well as from rebellious attitude present in the 90's music like Rage Against The Machines or Beastie Boys "Sabotage", songs which from the very beginning speak loudly about the rebellion, anarchy and revolution.
Other notable things mentioned on the podcast:
They already finished writing, producing and mixing the music for Cyberpunk and now all that's left to do for Marcin in the upcoming months is playtesting the game to catch any potential bugs and issues related to in-game music. Because of that he doesn't consider his job to be done until the game debut.
Outside of composing the music and setting the musical direction for various parts of the game, including different music for each city district, one of his duties is also implementation of the music into the game. Among the team of 800 people, there are only three people responsible for that: him, Piotr Adamczyk and QA audio guy, because they are the only people who knows this music well enough and know how to do it. That includes scripting for adaptive and interactive soundtrack, meaning stuff like the music track intensity changing based on the character's pace or the situation (like a sudden appearance of additional enemies).
