This is the third time we have stood in this booth. The first time, Neil Davidge walked in as a stranger and threw out the monks, and we wrote about that in the Halo 4 essay. The second time, Kazuma Jinnouchi, the insider who had been in the building all along, brought the chant back from exile, which is the story we told in the Halo 5 piece. Two games, two arguments about how much of the past a Halo score is allowed to carry. By the time Halo Infinite arrived in December 2021, on the franchise's twentieth anniversary, the argument had quietly burned itself out.

Because the people who scored it did not treat the original sound as a relic to honour or a debt to repay. They treated it as home. And rather than visit, they moved in.

A clean break, a third time

The pattern by now is almost a rule of the franchise: every new game, a new pair of hands. Jinnouchi, the insider who had given Halo 5 its reconciliation, left 343 Industries in 2018 to go independent, and the studio did not promote from within or chase another marquee outsider. It built a team. The campaign of Halo Infinite was scored by three composers working in concert, the British, Los Angeles-based Gareth Coker, the American Curtis Schweitzer, and the Chicago synth obsessive Joel Corelitz, all of it overseen by music supervisor Joel Yarger, with Alex Bhore and the studio Eternal Time & Space handling the separate free-to-play multiplayer score.

On paper a committee is a worrying way to score a Halo game. The series had always been the work of a single strong voice: O'Donnell, then Davidge, then Jinnouchi, each one stamping the music with an unmistakable personality. Three hands risked a soundtrack with no centre, a smear of competing instincts. What actually happened was the opposite, and the reason is the thing the previous two essays kept circling. These were not auteurs imposing a vision. They were fans, and what they shared was bigger than any one of their styles.

Three composers, one universe

Gareth Coker was the headline name, and for good reason. His scores for Ori and the Blind Forest and Ori and the Will of the Wisps are among the most beloved in modern gaming, all tranquil orchestral beauty and aching melody, and he carried that gift for serene, emotional writing straight into Halo. Curtis Schweitzer came from a more independent lineage, having scored Starbound and Earthlight, while Joel Corelitz brought a deep love of synthesisers and the electronic textures of the gaming systems he grew up on.

What unites them is the part of the process every one of them has described: learning the rules. Corelitz has spoken about how long it took to absorb Halo's established musical grammar so thoroughly that it became instinctive, so the sound of the universe could flow naturally out of him rather than being bolted on. That is the tell. Davidge learned Halo as a craftsman taking a commission. This trio learned it the way you learn the songs of your own childhood, until the rules stopped being rules and became second nature. Corelitz's favourite cue in the entire series is the original A Walk in the Woods, and you can hear that devotion all over what they built.

Zeta Halo, or the theme made sacred again

If Halo 5 brought the chant home as a statement, Halo Infinite brought it home as an act of worship. The track to point at is Zeta Halo, named for the ringworld the game takes place on, and it is, by a wide stretch of critical consensus, the finest rendition of the iconic O'Donnell and Salvatori main theme anyone has ever recorded. It leans almost entirely on the choir, the famous melody carried by voices alone, and the effect is to strip the theme back to the thing it always was underneath the orchestral muscle: a hymn. Twenty years of Halo music, distilled into one cue that sounds like the series remembering itself.

This is the difference between restoration and belonging. Jinnouchi reintroduced the theme into a score that was still, at heart, arguing with the past. Infinite does not argue. The theme is simply everywhere, reprised and woven and quoted across the album as the natural language of the place, the way you would expect a homecoming record to sound. The chant is no longer a gesture. It is the air.

The quiet score

Here is the surprise. After two albums that chased Hollywood scale, with their fifty-piece orchestras and Bulgarian choirs and Abbey Road sessions, the trilogy ends on the quietest Halo score in a generation. Infinite is the least bombastic, most pastoral music the modern series has produced. Gentle synthetic vocals, upbeat but unhurried percussion, serene string ambience, and that unmistakable plinking piano figure: the whole palette screams the Halo of 2001 and 2004 rather than the cinematic thunder of 2012. Coker's gift for tranquil beauty is the dominant colour, and it gives the album a contemplative, open-air calm that feels truer to the loneliness of walking a ringworld than any wall of brass ever did.

The clearest proof of intent is Through the Trees, which is a direct reprise of A Walk in the Woods from Combat Evolved, the cue Corelitz loves above all others, brought forward note for note into the new score. That is not sampling the past for nostalgia points. That is a composer planting the original flag and building the whole record in its shadow. Where Halo 4 moved on the beat and Halo 5 moved on grandeur, Infinite moves on atmosphere, and atmosphere is exactly what the first Halo understood best.

48 Campaign tracks

3 Composers, one ring

20 Years of Halo

The villains get a voice

A homecoming score still needs an enemy, and this is where the new blood earns its place. The campaign pits the Master Chief against the Banished, the mercenary warband that has seized Zeta Halo, and behind them a deeper threat called the Endless. The trio gave each its own identity. The Banished get a louder, more aggressive theme, all menace and brute weight. The Endless get something stranger and more unsettling, an eerie vocal motif that hangs in the air like a warning you cannot quite translate.

It matters because it keeps the album from collapsing into pure reverie. The pastoral calm of the exploration cues needs something to push against, and the antagonist themes supply the tension, the dread underneath the beauty. This is the same lesson every good Halo score has known since the beginning: the melancholy only lands because something out there is hunting you across all that open, gorgeous space.

The trilogy, resolved

Step back and the three scores tell one complete story about loss and return. Halo 4 was the departure, the brave and divisive choice to leave the old sound behind. Halo 5 was the homecoming, the insider reaching back to gather every era into one record and prove nothing had really been thrown away. Halo Infinite is neither of those things. It is the settling. The point where the music stops travelling, stops making statements about the past, and simply lives in the place it came from, comfortable enough to be quiet.

There is a reason it took three composers and twenty years to get here. You cannot settle somewhere you never left, and you cannot truly come home without first having gone away. Davidge had to leave for Jinnouchi's return to mean anything, and both of those journeys had to happen for this trio to be able to walk in, sit down, and write a score that sounds completely at peace with being a Halo score. The fight everyone kept promising to finish was never really about the Covenant or the Banished. It was about the music finding its way back to the ring and choosing to stay.

The tracks that matter

Forty-eight campaign cues is a lot to wade through. These are the ones that justify the swim.

Zeta Halo

The crown jewel, and arguably the best thing the franchise's music has done since Bungie left. The iconic theme reborn as almost pure choir, stately and aching and complete. If you play one track to explain why this score works, it is this one. It is the sound of twenty years arriving home.

The Road

The action summit. Thunderous, propulsive and built for the set pieces, this is the cut that proves the quiet score still has a fist when it needs one. The counterweight to all that pastoral calm, and a regular pick among fans for the album's most exciting two minutes.

Reverie, Through the Trees

The soul of the record. Reverie, one of the first cues released ahead of the game, is the mission statement: serene, spacious, unmistakably Halo. Through the Trees is the open love letter, a near-direct reprise of A Walk in the Woods that ties the whole twenty-year arc into a single melody. Together they are the album at its most honest.

Set a Fire in Your Heart

Coker's early calling card, released as a single ahead of launch and the first taste anyone got of the new direction. Bright, hopeful and propulsive, it told the fanbase before the game shipped that the sound was in safe, loving hands.

The Banished, Endless

The dark half. The aggressive weight of the Banished theme and the uncanny vocal dread of the Endless give the album its shadows. Without them the reverie would float away; with them, the beauty has stakes.

The afterlife

For the first time the Halo music came in two distinct bodies. Alongside the campaign album, the free-to-play multiplayer got its own score, A New Generation, handled largely by Alex Bhore, Joel Corelitz and the studio Eternal Time & Space, a brighter, leaner companion to the campaign's hush. Both landed digitally on 8 December 2021, with the multiplayer beta having already gone live on 15 November to mark the franchise's twentieth anniversary. A further album of music written for the game's post-launch seasons followed in February 2024.

The score also got the prestige-object treatment, with Mondo pressing a limited double vinyl of twenty-two campaign cues wrapped in original artwork by Ken Taylor and liner notes from the three composers. It is the kind of release a soundtrack earns only when people decide it is going to last, and a fitting full stop on a trilogy that began with a record the fanbase wasn't sure it could forgive.

Verdict

The reception was the warmest the modern series had enjoyed. Listeners called it the quietest and least bombastic of the Halo scores and loved it precisely for that, with more than a few placing it level with the Bungie-era classics, something nobody had seriously said about Halo 4 or 5. The most common complaint was not about the music at all. It was that the campaign and its much-criticised story never quite rose to the mood the soundtrack set, a rare case of a Halo game being outshone by its own score.

That is a remarkable place for the trilogy to end. Three games, three sets of hands, one long argument about how to carry a beloved sound into the future, resolved not by the boldest choice or the cleverest reconciliation but by the simplest one: trust the original, and mean it. The wandering was the point. You only understand what home sounds like once you have heard the music try everything else first.

No chant, then the chant came home, and finally the chant simply stayed. After twenty years and a journey out and back, the music stopped trying to prove anything and just sang the oldest hymn in the series, quietly, on a ring the size of a small moon, like it had never been away at all.