Caroline Polachek – “On The Beach (From Death Stranding 2: On The Beach)”
Caroline Polachek recently appeared on tracks from These New Puritans and caroline. Today, she’s got a new song of her own, but she’s once again contributing to someone else’s larger project. In this case, the larger project is Death Stranding 2: On The Beach, the latest work from the cult-beloved Japanese video game auteur Hideo Kojima. Death Stranding 2, the sequel to Kojima’s 2019 post-apocalyptic game, comes out later this week, and it’s a big deal in that world. The game has a score from Woodkid and Ludvig Forssell, and its soundtrack also features “On The Beach,” the new Polachek single that dropped today.
“On The Beach” has nothing to do with Neil Young. It’s a woozy, mournful, echo-drenched pop song that makes the most of Caroline Polachek’s operatic vocals even as it sometimes feeds those vocals through filters that make her sound robotic. Polachek co-produced the song with Danny L Harle, and she and Harle co-wrote it with Hideo Kojima. In a recent interview, Kojima had this to say:
I was listening to Caroline Polachek last year and became a big fan of hers. After I put that on my Instagram, she contacted me, and then she DM’ed. We kept in touch and then eventually met up in Paris, and that’s when she told me she wanted to write a new song for Death Stranding 2. She works very fast. You heard her song when you saw the Plate Gate — it’s called “On The Beach.”
see you on the beach @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN pic.twitter.com/hzFgqFpokg
— Caroline Polachek (@carolineplz) May 9, 2025
Today, Caroline Polachek releases “On The Beach,” as well as its largely drumless Timefall mix. Both versions of the song are awfully pretty. Listen below.
Caroline Polachek also did a recent interview of her own, talking about video games and about Death Stranding 2 in particular.
In other Caroline Polachek news, she just turned 40 on Friday. Also, she’ll appear alongside the Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, and Daniel Caesar on the new Blood Orange single “The Field,” which comes out on Thursday.
