Those who hold onto splintered memories of the video game Destiny will likely have forgotten Paul McCartney’s part in the series. Hope for the Future featured on an EP of the same name, a handful of songs used to promote the post-Halo Bungie project. It’s hardly the most memorable game, and this is definitely not the best McCartney song from the mid-2010s push. Between this and FourFiveSeconds, the odd collaboration with Kanye West and Rihanna, there is a clear winner. Hope for the Future slots into an awkward niche of work from McCartney around this time. He had revamped himself as a pop God, not coasting off of his previous works but actively seeking out a fresh sound. He did so on New, plugged away with a Nirvana collaboration which is surprisingly solid, and found himself pitched for projects that don’t feel like a particularly McCartney-friendly experience. Hence his appearance on the Destiny soundtrack with a forgotten track that, to be fair, is a lot better than the game it was written for.
Steady yourselves, though. It’s not quite a five-track EP, just different mixes of the same song. Take the main theme and run. Leave those mixes in the 1990s when Pulp were pouncing on Motiv-8 for runthroughs of Different Class singles. Torturous stuff, yet oddly popular. McCartney clearly wanted a slice of that particularly rotted cake, and gets his wish on Hope for the Future. For those wondering if McCartney would establish a futuristic sound with clanging instrumentals, this is not what you want. This is McCartney singing vaguely of a future which he has no interest in reading up on, and given how fast Destiny dropped off, nobody was all that interested in the fictional history of yet another interplanetary plot. What it means for Hope for the Future is that McCartney is grappling with extremely vague notions of what the future may hold. He can’t write up what he honestly thinks, this is not a project for such matters. It’s got to fit the mould of what the gameplay provides.
He sounds excellent, at least we can hold onto that. Instrumentally it’s as strong as can be when the concept is a few frayed notes on what the future could hold, and the necessary mention of Destiny in the lyrics. It’s the sort of operatic, string-section reliance you’d expect from lesser artists. That emotional gut punch comes not from McCartney’s lyrics, oddly vague and still somewhat passionate, but from the inevitable strings that back him. A bit of piano and guitar for good measure to give it the guise of a McCartney song, and repetition of the song’s title before a crescendo, it feels inevitable. Underwhelming, too. Still, Bungie at the time had the budget to throw big names into place. Just listen to Bill Nighy’s performance as some sort of alien librarian. Big names draw bigger crowds. Saying McCartney is on the soundtrack to your project is an instant win.
But it’s not as big a win when he phones it in. He sounds as though he’s putting words to a collection of instrumentals he had little say in. He’s been handed a brief, not an opportunity to share some sincere spark of music. Not every project can offer that, of course, but it’s a strange collection of science-fiction clichés, put to an instrumental which feels as though it’s trying to manufacture wonder beyond the stars. It sounds rather grim. A somewhat miserable realisation strikes on another listen to Hope for the Future. Our idols and heroes can be bought, packaged, and processed as just a piece of a wider, not at all interesting puzzle. McCartney’s efforts here are minimal, and to some degree, he is right to let it slide through with such an underwhelming note. But even then, it’d have been better if he had never bothered in the first place.
