Nintendo is a lot of things to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. Mario helps, and so do the host of other iconic first-party titles and the movies, toys, theme parks, and endless other IP offshoots they spawned. But beyond how Nintendo looks and plays and sells, it also has a sound, and thanks to the Switch 2, that sound is just as iconic as ever this time around. Seriously, though, listen to the Mario Kart World soundtrack, right now.
OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS???????? https://t.co/fqTjE7jNLf pic.twitter.com/5T4w0JjaF0
— Adri💫 (@AdriWindGB) June 10, 2025
There’s a lot of newfangled Switch 2 music I love already, but Mario Kart really hits home for me. As a listener of some prog rock out of Japan—Masayoshi Takanaka, I’m speaking to you directly—this feels like some kind of lab-grown earworm that I’d let take up residence in my brain rent-free. No utilities or broker fees, either. You can have the whole place; there’s not much going on in there outside of some useless facts about Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and Maslow’s hierarchy, anyway.
For Nintendo, it’s always been about the details, and the Switch 2 is no different. The games are the games—they’re the reason for Nintendo’s existence—but the Nintendo whimsy doesn’t just happen in the gameplay; it’s in the blips and beeps and absolute bops that sound engineers and composers have been churning out for decades now. The Switch 2, while still fresh out of the oven or womb or volcano—wherever Nintendo conjures its powerful gaming magic from—seems poised to give us even more of the same legendary music. For real, some fans agree that even the Switch 2 Welcome Tour, Nintendo’s infuriatingly paid $10 tutorial, doesn’t miss on music.
New chill Nintendo Switch 2 music just dropped. Why is Nintendo so good at making chill music pic.twitter.com/yDzPTG6k3Z
— Ray Wong (@raywongy) June 5, 2025
And it’s not just in the games; it’s in the menus, too. Setting up a console sucks (trust me, we found that out the hard way), but Nintendo’s crew of music magicians definitely makes it a little less annoying. Unlike Mario Kart’s virtuosic, prog-influenced jazz-funk guitar music, we get some calm, playful synth dub. That’s a new genre I just coined, and even if it’s not real, it’s the perfect level of chill for the occasion—that occasion being the realization that your failed system-to-system transfer just deleted all your Mario Kart saves. But damn, this song wrecks.
I know I sound like a Nintendo shill right now, but you know what… I’ll own that. There’s a lot to be grumpy about—the Switch 2 is expensive, the games are expensive, Virtual Game Cards are nightmarish, and third-party controllers and gen-one Switch controllers don’t freaking wake the console because of the use of a different “protocol.” No console launch is perfect, but it’s clear to me that there are just some things that Nintendo will never miss on, and music is one of them. That being said, if you’re reading this, Nintendo, you need to add music back into the eShop right now. I don’t even care if it makes the whole thing stutter, like I just tried to load Cyberpunk 2077 on a desktop running Windows XP, I will happily glitch out mid-purchase to hear a song even half as good as Aquatic Ambience.
