Behind-the-scenes music details are best served by the devs themselves!

We hope you brought your appetite, because the Cuphead – The Delicious Last Course DLC* is available now!

A brawl is surely brewing when Cuphead and Mugman depart for D.L.C. Isle. Luckily, the ever-adventurous Ms. Chalice is joining them to help jazz up the fight against even more wacky, monstrous bosses.

Before you get ready to dance with these big baddies, the devs behind Cuphead are giving you a taste of the tunes you can expect.

Behind the music, “HIGH-NOON HOOPLA”

Hi there!

My name is Eli Cymet, and I’m a Producer at Studio MDHR–the team behind Cuphead and its upcoming add-on DLC, The Delicious Last Course. I’ve had the pleasure of working on this project since its earliest stages of development, and we made a conscious effort this time around to really hone our craft and integrate lessons learned during the original game’s development.

Our goal for this expansion was for it to contain some of our most complex and technically ambitious work yet. This is particularly true for our music and soundtrack. To capture the richness and texture of large animated productions and the Golden Era of Hollywood, we put together a big band orchestra of over 110 performers to plumb the depths of the 30s and 40s for musical inspirations not seen in the original game.

Now, it was no easy feat to record live big-band music during the global COVID pandemic, which overlapped with most of our game’s production. We were so thankful to have an amazing session coordinator and recording engineer in our corner, Jeremy Darby, who ensured we were not only recording safely across many sessions, but doing so while achieving wonderful, full, and cohesive sound.

With all the proper safety measures in place, our composer, Kristofer Maddigan, approached this new soundtrack with a novel point of view. Rather than thinking of himself as a 2010s composer writing 30s-era music for an arcade action video game inspired by the 80s, he tried to reframe his perspective: what if the Golden Age of Big Band, the Golden Age of Hollywood, and the Golden Age of video games all existed at the same time? How would composers such as Ellington and Joplin, Steiner and Korngold, write for video games? To answer this question, let’s dive deep into one track from the game: High-Noon Hoopla, a propulsive jazz tune from our boss battle against Cowgirl outlaw Esther Winchester!

Inspired by artists like Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Jimmie Rodgers, Merl Lindsay, Joe Venuti, and Gene Autry, High-Noon Hoopla is Kris’s ode to all things western—a song meant to conjure images of frontier-set Hollywood films while still feeling distinctly like a “Cuphead song.”

Interestingly, High-Noon Hoopla is the only boss tune Kris has ever written which stays entirely in a major key. This track is host to several new sounds, ranging from the talented Colleen Allen on the not-oft-played Soprano C Melody saxophone to Yodeller (yes, yodeller!) Russell DeCarle, who is well known in the Canadian country music scene.

But for as deeply as Cuphead’s music is steeped in jazz, big-band, and orchestral music, we are all still very much fans of another genre of classics—iconic video game music.

In truth, we could go on forever about what goes into bringing a Cuphead song to life, but what better way to experience than to see it for yourself? We’re proud to collaborate with Nintendo to host a full behind-the-scenes featurette on this song, which you can check out here.

Bon appétit!