TEKE::TEKE Share 'Assassin’s Creed Shadows - Kage No Iro' Soundtrack

Japanese psych-rock group TEKE::TEKE has shared Assassin’s Creed: Shadows - Kage No Iro (Original Game Soundtrack), offering six original songs in addition to their own fiery take on the series’ recurring theme, “Ezio’s Family.” The album release arrives as both a thrilling new entry in TEKE::TEKE’s discography, as well as an exciting evolution for Ubisoft, with the songs playing in-game for the first time, tied intrinsically to the story to soundtrack key narrative moments.

While composers and longtime Ubisoft collaborators The Flight were again charged with the game’s score, the video game giant had never used a full album of original songs to deepen the game’s narrative immersion, until now. Kage No Iro (Original Game Soundtrack) by TEKE::TEKE is now available to hear within the game as well as a standalone album out on streaming platforms everywhere now.

Wind, forest, fire, mountain. Those four words emphasize warriors’ swiftness, gentleness, ferocity, and unshakability. But another element flits through the background—a shadow, slipping through your fingers and yet strong enough to bring everything to its end. “Formless things become everything, disappearing and reappearing,” Kuroki sings. That shadow is the shinobi, a spy, a warrior, a ninja, a survivor — much like Naoe, one of the two protagonists of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. The formidable Montreal-based seven-piece utilize that same shapeshifting strength to detail Naoe’s journey throughout the game.

The TEKE::TEKE members’ Japanese heritage connected them deeply to the game’s setting. Their surf and psych rock influences were a natural match for the game’s direction and were adopted readily by the whole team, to the delight of music supervisors Benedicte Ouimet and Jerome Angelot, who were imagining a Tarantino soundtrack when sourcing music for Shadows. As the Ubisoft team was developing its first playable demos, Mr. Angelot recalled TEKE::TEKE’s composer Sei Nakauchi Pelletier’s scoring work, while at the same time, someone on the development team was pushing to use Shirushi hit “Meikyu” for the game’s first internal playable demo. "That track is a banger, and everyone immediately agreed we needed the band to be part of the project," Mr. Angelot says. 

Once tasked with composing the music to score cinematics in Naoe’s storyline, Kuroki became an inveterate researcher, digging into every source relating to samurai and shinobi she could find. As the band continued writing, they worked closely with Angelot, Ouimet, and the Ubisoft development teams. The teams would work together, taking pieces of TEKE::TEKE’s music and fitting them into the early drafts of the game—Pelletier and Kuroki dedicated to manifesting the world of Shadows and Angelot embracing the band’s style and ensuring he was honoring Kuroki’s Japanese lyrics. 

Pelletier says, “We got so much out of their scripts, and they essentially became part of the band.” For Kuroki, it was crucial to dig into the psyche of the samurai and shinobi. "I wanted to know about their real human life, their philosophy, their feelings,” something reflected strongly in the album’s lyrics. “They can change their form,” she says of the shinobi, “know yourself, know your opponent, and conquer yourself.”

Assassin’s Creed Shadows - Kage No Iro (Original Game Soundtrack) finds TEKE::TEKE pulling off the astounding feat of honoring their idiosyncratic worldview while also fitting seamlessly into the Assassin’s Creed universe—and the result is a set of songs that will enrapture gamers and those listening to the album on its own alike. “This album helped us hone into the cinematic part of our band that has always been there, to focus on elements we already had and push them even further,” Pelletier explains. And it's in that experience that TEKE::TEKE fittingly tapped into shinobi-do, the philosophy of the shinobi that remains central to the game. “Train your mind. Develop patience,” Kuroki says. “It’s not for dominating the world, it’s for dominating the self.”

Photo Credit: TEKE::TEKE