How Music Transformed Zenless Zone Zero

When HoYoverse drops a new game, players have come to expect sweeping, high-fantasy orchestral arrangements and space-opera symphonies. But Zenless Zone Zero completely shatters that playbook, swapping out concert halls for the gritty, high-energy pulse of underground club culture and vintage aesthetics.

From the lo-fi chill of Sixth Street to the high-octane EDM pounding through the Hollows, New Eridu’s music rises above most video game soundtracks as the driving heartbeat of the entire experience. Behind this pivot into funk, acid jazz, and electronic sub-genres is Yang Wutao and the tight-knit team of producers and composers known as Sān-Z Studio. Operating more like a collective of late-night crate-diggers than traditional gaming composers, Sān-Z Studio's philosophy is fiercely straightforward: prioritize raw emotion over industry trends.

With the game's highly anticipated physical soundtrack dropping on vinyl via Laced Records on April 29th, fans are getting a tactile, analog way to bring a piece of the game's world into their own living rooms. IGN sat down with Yang Wutao to discuss the creation of the music for Zenless Zone Zero.

IGN: One of the standout features of Zenless Zone Zero is how every Agent feels very unique. When you're developing the character EPs, what's the internal process for selecting a genre to match an Agent's DNA? For example, how did you land on EDM?

Yang Wutao: Music exists to express emotion — otherwise it's just sound. So we've never had a "genre selection" process when it comes to character EPs. There's only ever one question: who is this character, and what do they want to say?

The IP team gives us a foundation, but we'll continue to dig deeper from there. We'll figure out things that aren't written into the lore, but a real person would naturally have. For example, nobody told us what Yanagi thinks about on her commute home, but she's so busy, so used to taking care of everyone else, that I naturally found myself wondering: when she's walking home alone, what's going through her mind? That's the moment I wanted to capture. Caesar looks tough on the outside, but she's a Pisces, someone who's genuinely sensitive underneath. So we leaned into that side of her. Burnice is wild and full of energy, so EDM's explosive feel just made sense.

We don't really think along the lines of, "Oh, this genre is trending, let's use it." Emotion comes first, and the genre follows. Once we're clear on who the character really is, the sound will naturally find itself.

After hearing me say all this, maybe go back and give all the EPs another listen — you might even spot a few cases where we fell flat in terms of expression.

IGN: We've seen the game collaborate with massive names like Tiësto and partner with festivals like Creamfields. It's clear that club culture is baked into the game's soul. How does the energy of dance music influence the design aesthetic and music?

Yang Wutao: It's the other way around, actually. Electronic music didn't shape Zenless Zone Zero, but rather, it's more like a group of like-minded people came together, and what we made just naturally turned out this way. That's exactly why collaborating with DJs like Tiësto felt like a natural extension of what we were already doing.

EDM fits this game because it's inherently energetic. It has no lyrics, not a lot of melody, and is built on loops. But through verses, build-ups, drops, and other sorts of unconventional sound design, it affects us emotionally. You don't need to understand it, you just need to feel it. That's exactly the kind of experience Zenless Zone Zero wants to give players.

And honestly, a lot of games in the industry are going orchestral. We didn't want to go down that road — we wanted to be fundamentally different. The project team and our producers gave us the space to do that, and we ran with that direction.

The results proved it was the right call. Whether it was Creamfields in the UK, ZZZ FES here in China, or ZLive events in Japan, US, and other locations, we didn't have any flashy high-tech stage setups. We just played the music, and the crowd went wild. That's not us being impressive, it's just the energy that electronic music carries on its own. It has this thing where it puts you in the zone right then and there.

IGN:The character EPs often feel like they belong on a festival stage rather than a traditional game soundtrack. When you're in the studio, are you approaching these tracks as video game music or are you trying to write a standalone pop or rock song that could be a hit on the radio?

Yang Wutao: While in the studio, we've never once asked ourselves, "Is this game music or a pop single?" That framing just isn't part of our initial considerations at all.

We only ever start from one place: does this music have emotion, does it have energy, and is it well-made? When a piece of music really lands, it stops being purely functional — it becomes a song. The game has hundreds of tracks, and some of their respective scenes are short, so some tracks are more for utility. And that's fine. But character EPs are different — those are the ones where we hold ourselves to the highest standard.

Of course, we also recognize that the game and the music elevate and complement each other. The fact that ZZZ's music has reached so many people and resonated the way it has, that wouldn't have happened without the game as a platform, and we're genuinely grateful for that.

But we have a bigger goal in mind: if someday someone who doesn't play Zenless Zone Zero, or even someone who has no connection to this ACG world at all, hears the music and loves it purely on its own terms — that's the biggest sort of validation we can get. If we get there, great. If not, we