Rockstar has spent the last fortnight watching a strange, slow-motion tease play out across musicians' social accounts — Travis Scott, Keith Richards and others posting cryptic Vice City-coded images with no explanation. On Thursday the explanation arrived: Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, made in partnership with Atlantic Records, launching on November 19 alongside the game itself.
It is 34 original tracks. Not licensed cuts, not a compilation of existing songs slotted onto in-game radio — original material written for the record, from a roster Rockstar describes as genre-defying and which, on the evidence of the first six singles, is not overselling it.
The six singles that are out now
All six went live on streaming services the moment the announcement dropped:
- Yung Lean – That's It (feat. Future & Metro Boomin)
- Travis Scott – RHYNO (produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo)
- CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso, PinkPantheress, Fred again.. & Etienne de Crécy – Sexy Magic
- Morgan Wallen – Last Thing You Need
- Rauw Alejandro – Macacoa 2000
- Keith Richards – Bright Lights, Big City
Read that list again, because the spread is the story. A Swedish cloud-rap veteran with Future and Metro Boomin on the hook. One half of Daft Punk producing Travis Scott. An Argentine duo on a track with PinkPantheress, Fred again.. and a French house producer who has been at it since the nineties. A country superstar. A Puerto Rican reggaeton hitmaker. And a Rolling Stone.
That is not a playlist anyone assembles by accident. It is Leonida rendered as a tracklist — a state where Miami bass, trap, reggaeton, country radio and old-money rock all occupy the same fifty miles of coastline, and Rockstar has been drawing that collision since the first trailer.
Vinyl, CD, and three exclusives
Here is the wrinkle worth sitting with. Grand Theft Auto VI itself is a digital-only release — no disc, no box. Its soundtrack, meanwhile, is getting one of the most elaborate physical rollouts of the year.
Three exclusives are only available through gtavi-thealbum.com: a limited-edition liquid-filled vinyl, a splatter-edition vinyl, and a CD jewel case. On top of that, Rockstar is doing exclusive vinyl disc colourways — each with unique new art — through Blood Records, Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Urban Outfitters and independent record shops.
The package art alone is doing a lot of work: flamingos, alligators, a martini glass, the Rockstar logo rendered in the pink-and-blue palette the marketing has been running on all year. A liquid-filled vinyl is an expensive, fussy object to manufacture and a genuinely bad way to store music. It is also exactly the sort of thing that sells out in an afternoon.
What is still to come
Rockstar closed the announcement by flagging more music details to come — specifically the dynamic score and what it calls “the next evolution of in-game radio.” Both phrases are doing some quiet heavy lifting.
A dynamic score implies the soundtrack reacts to play rather than looping behind it, which would be a first for the series at any meaningful scale. And “next evolution” of radio, in a franchise whose radio stations are arguably its single most beloved feature across two decades, is a deliberately large claim to make and then walk away from without elaborating.
The album is on pre-save across major streaming services now, with vinyl and CD sets open for pre-order. Everything lands on November 19 — the same day as the game.
