The first time, the question was whether anyone could touch the liturgy without committing sacrilege. We spent a whole essay on that one, on the way Neil Davidge kept the faith and threw out the chant, and you can read the full reckoning with the Halo 4 score here. By the time Halo 5: Guardians arrived in 2015, the question had quietly flipped on its head. The monks had already been banished. The franchise had proved it could live without its own hymn. So the new problem was the opposite of the old one: now that the chant was gone, could anyone bring it home again without the gesture sounding like an apology?

The man who answered was not a stranger flown in for a single campaign. He had been sitting inside the audio team the entire time, and he did the one thing Davidge had refused to do. He walked back into the temple and started singing the old words.

The succession, resolved

Davidge was always a guest. A brilliant one, the Bristol producer who reframed the entire series around the beat, but a guest all the same, flown in to score one game and then gone, back to his own records and his own films. When the time came to fill the booth again, 343 Industries did not go hunting for another famous outsider to borrow. They looked at the man who had never left. Kazuma Jinnouchi had been embedded in the studio's audio team since 2011, the quiet second author of the Halo 4 score, and in June 2014 he was confirmed as the sole composer of the sequel.

It was the most logical hire in the world and, on the surface, the least exciting. There was no story here about a daring stranger, no headline about a trip-hop renegade let loose on a sacred franchise. There was just a craftsman who had earned the room, who knew every cue and every motif in the canon because he had spent years living next to them. That familiarity is the whole point. Davidge approached Halo as a believer let in from outside. Jinnouchi approached it as a custodian who had been handed the keys.

The insider, uncovered

If you read the Halo 4 piece you already know the shape of him. Born in Hiroshima, trained at the Berklee College of Music, then years at Konami and Kojima Productions writing for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Peace Walker. It was his old Konami audio boss, Sotaro Tojima, who pulled him across the Pacific to 343 in 2011, and the two of them would run point on Halo's sound together. On the first album his footprint was a single track, 117, the cue named for the Master Chief's service number. On Volume 2 his contributions multiplied to nine. By Halo 5 there was no second name on the spine at all.

What that solo billing bought him was freedom of a particular kind. A guest composer reinvents because reinvention is the safest way to justify his presence; nobody hires Massive Attack's architect to do an O'Donnell tribute act. An insider has no such pressure. Jinnouchi did not need to prove he was bold. He needed to prove he understood the whole of it, every era and every hand that had touched the music, and that he could hold them all in one record without dropping any. So he stopped choosing between the past and the present. He decided to score the reunion of both. His later move into film and television, from Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 to Star Wars: Visions, only confirms the instinct that runs through this score: a composer who treats a soundtrack as one long act of memory.

Halo Canticles, or the chant comes home

Press play on this score and the statement arrives inside the first ten seconds. The opening cue is called Halo Canticles, and what floats out of it is the thing the entire Halo 4 score had pointedly refused to give you: the Gregorian chant, Martin O'Donnell and Michael Salvatori's monastic theme, the six-note liturgy that defined the series before anyone had fired a shot. It comes back melancholic and stately, the choir handing the motif to strings and then to electronics, drifting through several reprises before resolving on a deliberately unfinished, forlorn crescendo somewhere past the four-minute mark.

The decision is not subtle and it is not meant to be. Where Davidge made his loudest statement by leaving the monks out, Jinnouchi makes his by putting them back in the very first thing you hear. But this is restoration, not reversal. The chant returns wearing Jinnouchi's more cinematic, orchestral clothes, scored in the grand sweep he learned at Konami rather than O'Donnell's tighter, dread-soaked original. It is not better than the first version and it does not try to be. It is the old hymn sung in a new voice, by someone who clearly loves it, and after one whole game in exile that homecoming lands like a release of breath.

Built like a blockbuster, again

Nobody scaled this back. If Halo 4 spent like a Hollywood tentpole, Halo 5 spent like its sequel. The orchestral sessions were tracked at Abbey Road across five separate trips, captured on sixteen microphones to get the depth and the room sound a score this size demands. The choral work was recorded separately, a thirty-voice choir laid down at the Rudolfinum concert hall in Prague for six of the tracks, Halo Canticles among them, which is precisely why the chant's return sounds like a cathedral and not a sample. Tojima ran the whole operation as audio director, and the album was mixed by Alan Meyerson, whose credits stretch across the kind of films, Dunkirk and The Dark Knight among them, that Halo had always quietly wanted to stand beside.

The result is a record built for size. Two discs, thirty-nine tracks, a little over two hours of music, all of it orchestrated to fill a very large room. The ambition is right there in the production budget, and it pays off in the moments when the choir and the full orchestra lock together. It also, as we will get to, occasionally works against the album, because two hours of relentless intensity is a lot to ask of anyone in one sitting.

39 Tracks, two discs

30 Voice choir, Prague

16 Mics at Abbey Road

Blue versus orange

The single smartest structural idea on the album comes straight out of the game's premise, and it is the thing that saves the score from being a pure nostalgia exercise. Halo 5 splits its story between two squads who spend the campaign hunting each other: the Master Chief and Blue Team on one side, the newly minted Spartan Jameson Locke and Fireteam Osiris on the other. Jinnouchi turned that rivalry into a compositional engine. He gave the old, beloved canon to the Chief, and he wrote a brand-new theme for the newcomers, then set the two against each other across the whole record.

The new material is muscular and openly cinematic. Locke and Osiris ride a bright, brass-forward motif first heard in Light Is Green, all horns and strings and electronics building to a logo-drop swagger, then reworked with heavier, almost tribal percussion in Kamchatka to suit the jungle world the game takes place on. Against that stands the Chief's side of the ledger, which is where Jinnouchi reaches back into the vault. The blue-versus-orange premise is not just a plot summary; it is the literal organising principle of the music, old gods set against new blood, and it gives a two-hour album a spine it would otherwise lack.

A peace treaty in three composers

The deepest thing this score does is reconcile. Halo 4 drew a hard line between the Bungie past and the 343 present, and the fanbase argued about that line for years. Halo 5 rubs it out. Across the record Jinnouchi threads in motifs from every era at once: the Opening Suite from O'Donnell's original Combat Evolved, the One Final Effort melody from Halo 3, and his own 117 theme carried over from Halo 4, which finally gets the full, heroic workout the first album only hinted at.

Hear it for what it is and the architecture becomes moving. This is a single record holding the work of three different composers across fourteen years in one set of hands, refusing to pick a winner. O'Donnell's chant, Davidge's electronic chassis, Jinnouchi's own cinematic grandeur, all present, all speaking to one another. After a game spent learning to live without its hymn, the franchise got an album whose entire thesis is that nothing was ever lost, only set aside, and that all of it could come home at once.

The tracks that matter

Ask the people who have lived with this album which cuts justify the two-hour runtime, and the same names keep surfacing. These are the ones the score is remembered for.

Halo Canticles

The headline, and rightly so. The opening cue that drags the Gregorian theme back into the light, four-plus minutes of chant, strings and electronics circling the oldest melody in the series. Even listeners who never warmed to Jinnouchi name this as the moment Halo 5 earned its place in the canon. It is the track the whole essay turns on, because it is the sound of a debt being repaid.

Blue Team

The quiet jewel. A wordless, tragic-feeling piece for the Master Chief and the Spartans he grew up with, built on slowly gathering, proudly determined brass that tells a story without a single line of dialogue. It is the cut most often singled out as the emotional heart of the record, the Halo 5 answer to the kind of restrained, aching writing that made Green and Blue the keeper from the last album.

The Trials

The action summit, and the clearest proof of the reconciliation thesis. It fuses the original Combat Evolved theme with the 117 motif from Halo 4, welding two eras into one relentless, three-beat surge of drums, low piano and brass. It was popular enough to escape the game entirely, later turning up on the soundtracks for Forza Horizon 3 and 4. Two of the franchise's best ideas, fired at the same target.

Light Is Green, Kamchatka

The orange half of the album. This is the Fireteam Osiris theme in its two main guises, the bright cinematic original under Locke's opening cinematic, then the percussion-heavy jungle rework. If you want to hear the brand-new blood Jinnouchi brought to a score otherwise busy honouring the dead, start with these.

Walk Softly, Covenant Prayer, Advent, Warrior World

The deep bench. Walk Softly quietly resurrects the Mantis theme for the longtime faithful; Warrior World leans into a woodwind-led, East-Asian colour that is among the album's most distinctive moments; Advent and Covenant Prayer do the connective work that holds the marquee cues together. Not everything here is essential, but the people who defend this score hardest tend to name a cut from this group when they do it.

The afterlife

The music escaped before the game did. During the multiplayer beta roughly twenty-five minutes of the score leaked online, an early airing Microsoft was openly unhappy about, though no legal action followed. The album proper landed on 30 October 2015, three days after the game, with five tracks, Halo Canticles, Light Is Green, Kamchatka, The Trials and the Osiris Suite, dangled as pre-order bait. Cues from the record went on to do second tours of duty, reused across levels of Halo: Fireteam Raven and, as noted, lifted wholesale into the Forza Horizon games.

For Jinnouchi it was a finish line as much as a milestone. He left Microsoft and went independent the following year, taking the artisan instinct he had honed across two Halo scores out into film and television: Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, an episode of Star Wars: Visions, Makoto Shinkai's Suzume, and more recently the score for Batman: Arkham Shadow. The torch O'Donnell once carried had, by then, changed hands twice. The second pair of hands handed it on knowing exactly what it had been holding.

Verdict

The critics were warm but not worshipful, and a careful read of the reviews lands the score in interesting, well-orchestrated, dark and powerful territory, capped by a BAFTA Games Award nomination for Best Music. The complaints are real and worth stating plainly. There is an over-reliance on strings the older scores rationed more carefully. Two hours of unbroken intensity can curdle into monotony, the album occasionally trading thrilling for merely loud. And the sheer breadth of influence, classic Halo, leftover Halo 4 electronica, sweeping film-score grandeur, Asian colour, can read less as a unified statement than a composer trying to satisfy every faction at once.

But measure it against the brief the franchise actually faced and the achievement comes into focus. Halo 4 had split the room by walking away from the past. Halo 5 set out to gather everyone back, and on its best tracks it does exactly that. The players who spent an entire game mourning the missing chant found it waiting for them in the very first cue, sung back to them by someone who had clearly loved it all along. If Halo 4 was the brave departure, this is the homecoming, and a homecoming only works because someone once dared to leave.

The chant came home. The compromise was over. What was left was an act of remembering, sung back to a series that had spent one whole game learning to live without its own hymn, by the insider who had been keeping the words safe the entire time.