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Turnstile, Biffy Clyro, Foals, Ninajirachi and Spiritbox Drive Forza Horizon 6’s Eclectic Soundtrack
Forza Horizon 6’s soundtrack arrives May 19 with nine radio stations. Early playlists — Horizon XS, Sub Pop, Horizon Bass Arena and Horizon Block Party — cram Turnstile, Biffy Clyro, Foals, Ninajirachi, Spiritbox and more into a weird, exhilarating mix.
Playground Games is treating Forza Horizon 6 like a cross-continental mixtape. The studio has revealed multiple in-game radio playlists ahead of the May 19 launch, and the result is less a single mood and more a shove of many moods into the player’s ears: hardcore and pop, shoegaze and drum’n’bass, indie stalwarts and stadium-ready punk.
The headline is the scale: nine radio stations will be available when the game drops on Xbox, PlayStation and PC. Four of those stations have had their full playlists published so far — Horizon XS, Sub Pop, Horizon Bass Arena and Horizon Block Party — and they read like festival lineups organized by someone who skips genre fences.
Horizon XS is where the brakes come off. It’s a mash of mosh-ready modern rock and aggressive post-hardcore: Turnstile slots in with ‘SOLE’, Spiritbox with ‘Keep Sweet’, Biffy Clyro with the oddball sing-song of ‘Friendshipping’, and there are curveballs too — BABYMETAL’s theatrical J-metal, Linkin Park’s alt-era grit, Coheed and Cambria’s sprawling riffs. The station feels like a late-night set at a cavernous venue, the soundtrack to driving fast down a cliff edge. It’s loud and intentionally messy.
Sub Pop’s in-game incarnation keeps more to the label’s wheelhouse: jangly and melancholy indie from Foals (‘Olympic Airways’), The Shins (‘Phantom Limb’), Band of Horses, and more recent left-field picks like CHAI. If you want a breath while you cruise the map, this is the station you pick. There’s something quietly comforting about hearing that familiar Seattle label’s roster threaded through sunlit highways and rainy towns in a video game.
Horizon Bass Arena is the dancefloor: Ninajirachi’s glitchy ‘Infohazard’ sits beside Rusko and Subtronics, and even a Calvin Harris remix sneaks in. The station swings between club-ready stomps and cerebral IDM moments — perfect for late-night drifting or for when you want the map to feel like a rave hidden under the palms.
Then there’s Horizon Block Party, which mixes rap, neo-soul and global flavors: Little Simz, Public Enemy, Anderson .Paak and Lil Nas X rub shoulders with Japanese and UK scenes. Block Party is not subtle; it’s the soundtrack you pick when you want your in-game car to feel like a rolling crew of friends announcing themselves in a neighborhood.
Across these stations the curatorial choices make a point: this is not just background music. Playground’s selection moves quickly from crowd-pleasing hits to smaller, left‑field picks — a strategy that mimics modern festival programming and playlists on streaming services, where discovery hides next to certainties. That means you’ll stumble into bands you know well and immediately spin out to stuff you don’t — which, honestly, is part of the fun.
There’s also a cultural logic to the lineup. Including a Sub Pop channel signals a deliberate nod to indie’s legacy; the presence of hardcore-leaning Turnstile and Spiritbox acknowledges the current appetite for heavy music in mainstream spaces; and the Bass Arena underscores how dance culture lives inside driving games now. The whole package reads like a generation’s record collection being dumped into the glovebox.
For fans this is exciting for obvious reasons: highways become stages, and setlists become reasons to explore the map. Players who follow these artists will be pleased — and surprised — by how songs refract against weather changes, race events and the game’s day-night cycle. Expect clips of in-game moments set to your favorite tracks to start flooding social feeds the week after launch.
Playground Games still has a few stations left to unveil — Horizon Pulse, Hospital Records, Gacha City Radio, Horizon Wave and Horizon Opus — so there’s more to come. But with Turnstile crashing into the same soundscape as Foals, Ninajirachi and Public Enemy, Forza Horizon 6 has already staked a claim as one of the most musically adventurous entries in the series.
If you’re the sort of player who treats a soundtrack like a second character, this one feels like a promise: loud, strange, and generous. And yes, it will probably make you pull over just to listen.
