I spend a lot of time with headphones on, and more often than not I’m listening to dark folk. It really all started with Pacific Drive, a compelling first-person driving game set in the Olympic Peninsula, developed by Ironwood Studios. Alongside its stunning visuals, and a fascinating gameplay loop, it ships with a fantastic, otherworldly soundtrack. At first it was just a sound I liked: simple instruments, voices that felt raw instead of polished, a kind of heaviness that was comforting rather than draining. Over time, I realized it wasn’t just background noise. Paired with the anomalous environment, and the gritty-but-gorgeous aesthetic of the game, it was shaping the way I thought about atmosphere and storytelling.

_{Community Screenshot from the game Pacific Drive}

Dark folk songs build slowly. They don’t rush to the chorus, and they don’t try to overwhelm you with volume. Instead, they linger on small details: the scrape of strings, the space between notes, the weight of a single lyric. That patience is something I’ve carried into my own work. Whether I’m writing code, designing a game system, or putting together a Blender scene, I try to leave room for the quiet parts to matter.

What I love most is the honesty. These songs don’t feel engineered to fit a chart or a playlist. They feel personal, like they were meant to be heard around a fire rather than blasted in a stadium. That intimacy is the same feeling I want to capture when I build something creative. I don’t need it to reach everyone. I just want it to reach the right people, in the right way.

I’ve noticed that mood carries across mediums. The atmosphere in a song can influence the way I design a world in Utopia TTRPG, or the way I texture a scene in Blender. Music isn’t just sound; it’s tone, and tone is what makes a story feel alive.

_{My custom playlist of Dark Folk music, including the ingame soundtrack from Pacific Drive}

In the end, dark folk resonates with me because it’s about depth. It’s not afraid to be quiet, or slow, or heavy. And when I sit down to build, that’s the energy I want to bring: something thoughtful, something that lingers, something that feels like it belongs to a larger story.

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Let it play out. 🎶