From Maybe by The Ink Pots to Easy Living by Billie Holiday, Fallout games have always featured fantastic music. The steampunk aesthetic meshes surprisingly well with the 30s and 40s jazz of the soundtracks. However, there are some great folk songs out there that evoke a real sense of Fallout when I listen to them. Maybe it’s something about the journey, or perhaps it’s the lingering nostalgia that’s so often imbued in folk music; either way, here are 10 folk songs that I think would lend themselves well to a Fallout 76 playlist, which you can listen to as you wait for the game to be released next month.
1. “Ocean City” – Kurt Vile

Ocean City is a song from Kurt Vile’s Square Shells EP. It’s not jazz, but it’s so distinctively Fallout it hurts. From the lyrics?”they say Ocean City’s the place to be, but can you get me there for free"”? to the lo-fi nature of the song, it screamed Fallout the first time that I heard it, and it continues to remind me of Fallout 3 to this day. This is the kind of song that would keep the Lone Wanderer in high spirits as he traversed the desolate and barren Wasteland. 2. “Somebody That I Used To Know” – Elliott Smith

The lyrics from the second song of Elliott Smith’s Figure 8 album are concerned with an upset nostalgia, commenting on a friendship or relationship that died in the past. This kind of confused nostalgia is ...