The team at Dambuster Studios has gone to incredible lengths to make the SoLA music festival the ultimate zombie-slaying playground. And where would any festival be without a line-up of amazing bands?

SoLA’s roster brings in the best from a diverse range of styles and genres. One minute you could be smashing shamblers to the beats of Broke N Boned, the hip-hop group that fuses nineties gangster rap with samurai B-movie cool. The next, you could be dismembering the dead to the monster riffs of Decapitize, a hard rock band mixing new age mysticism and doomy, distortion-drenched metal.

Looking for a different sound? The New Puppeteers combine mod nostalgia with edgy new-wave guitars, bringing their effortless, quirky cool to the party. And when you’re looking for a groove to slay to, Digital Meadow’s funky vampire elegies have the Dracula meets electro beats you’ve been waiting for. 

Building bands

For every band and artist, the art team had to come up with a distinct aesthetic and believable visual style. Meanwhile Senior Audio Designer and Music Composer Ryan Williams and the audio team created the tracks and immersive soundscapes that bring SoLA buzzing to life.

‘We work with the narrative team on the names, and then we come up with a story that we want to build on’ says Georgia Bates, Dambuster Studio Graphic and UI Artist. ‘We want the players to feel like the world they’re in in Dead Island 2 is real, and that the bands are cemented in this world through the art and music’.

You can see what she means in the Hip-Hop visuals for Broke N Boned and their album Leaded Spines, with its fallen warrior cover star impaled with katanas straight through the backbone. Meanwhile, Digital Meadow’s album, Kelly’s Friend, weaves its own soulful story of a vampire’s last goodbye. Each band logo or poster helps to make each act feel grounded in reality – or at least the reality of Dead Island 2.

‘We research contemporary bands, genres and art styles’ Bates explains, ‘then we try and parody and exaggerate what we’ve found.’ Broke N Boned reflects a specific era and style of gangster rap, while Decapitize’s distinctive look combines grunge with psychedelia.

And the team always keeps Dead Island 2’s satirical tone right in the foreground, just as it did when it worked on the Dead Island 2’s faded rock legends, Gods and Whiskey. ‘I think that, as a studio, we do that quite well’ says Bates. ‘Because we’re European and the America we see is the America on TV,  we can build on that idealised, Americana pop culture vibe.’

Music for the main stage

Of course, Gods and Whiskey gives the new bands a hard act to follow. ‘I think there’s always pressure’ says Williams ‘ because Gods and Whiskey were really, really loved. But when we get to the music, we have such a rich world already built for us in terms of the narrative and the art, and all these awesome swaggering characters, and we get to play inside of that.’

To make the bands’ setlist tracks, Williams and the audio team work to get into the head of the characters, bringing together sounds and influences from bands of the same style and era.

‘Gods and Whiskey is a brilliant example of that’ Williams adds ‘where we had this leviathan of an ageing rock star who was big two decades ago. There were tons of influences we could take from the nineties and 2000s – we could look at LA centric bands and what they were doing at the time, and put it all into a sort of genre pool. We made some amazing playlists.’

For the audio team, SoLA’s festival theme was a chance to live out their rock star fantasies, diving into the characters behind the music, with different members of the team recreating different styles. ‘We’re allowed to turn it up to eleven – the old Spinal Tap reference – and really grab people, crank it up and go to town’ says Williams. ‘Sometimes we can go a bit cheesy. Sometimes we can get really extreme. But we’re always trying to grab the player and make the bands we create something that stays with them.’

That goes double in an expansion where music is so core to the whole experience. ‘In SoLA we wanted to bring players right into the festival’ Williams says, ‘so that when you meet the bands – and you could meet them in combat – you’ll have a real sense of their personality.’

That’s something you can feel as you explore the different areas of the festival, hearing the music of one band bleed into the music of another – just in time to hack, slash and bash your way through another brutal zombie horde.