Bond theme songs are supposed to feel like events. When Adele's Skyfall dropped ahead of the 2012 film, it stopped people mid-scroll. When Paul McCartney handed over Live and Let Die, it became a rock standard. The best ones have a life outside the film, outside the franchise, and outside whatever marketing cycle produced them.
Lana Del Rey's "First Light," the official theme for IO Interactive's upcoming stealth action game 007 First Light, does not have that quality. The song appeared without warning on April 17, a surprise drop tied to the game's promotional rollout ahead of its May 27 release. And the surprise is mostly that it isn't better.
What the song actually sounds like
Here's the thing: "First Light" is not a bad song because it breaks the Bond mold. It's a disappointment because it follows the mold so precisely that it loses all personality in the process.
The slow strings are there. The punchy brass hits land on cue. The lyrics do that semi-awkward Bond wordplay thing, with lines like "Dying just to know whether you'll play your life like a game" that tie back to the spy-thriller premise without saying anything particularly memorable. Del Rey's voice, which on her best work carries real weight and atmosphere, gets buried under the production. The whole thing comes off polished to the point of being frictionless.
PC Gamer senior video producer Scott Tanner, describing himself as a lifelong Bond fan, put it bluntly: "Lana Del Meh." That's a fair summary.
This is a critique of the track itself, not Del Rey as an artist. Her catalog includes genuinely excellent work. "First Light" just isn't part of it.
Bond themes that actually had a pulse
For context, the Bond theme canon has real highs and real lows, and the gap between them matters here.
Adele's Skyfall works because it's unmistakably an Adele song that happens to be a Bond theme, not the other way around. The same goes for Sheena Easton'sFor Your Eyes Only and Carly Simon'sNobody Does It Better, both of which have held up for decades precisely because they carry the artist's identity. Even Duran Duran'sA View to a Kill stamps the band's sound onto the formula.
The weaker entries tend to be the ones that treat the Bond template as a checklist. Chris Cornell'sYou Know My Name from Casino Royale is a decent example: a vocalist with a genuinely powerful range, handed a song that never lets him use it. "First Light" has a similar problem.
What most players miss in this conversation is that Del Rey actually has Bond theme history. She revealed in 2024 that "24.," a track from her 2015 album Honeymoon, was written specifically for the Bond film Spectre. Producers passed on it and went with Sam Smith'sWriting's On the Wall instead, a track that somehow won both a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Original Song despite being one of the more forgettable entries in the franchise.
What this means for 007 First Light
The theme song is one piece of a larger picture. 007 First Light is still one of the most anticipated games of the year, built by the team behind the modern Hitman trilogy. IO Interactive has the credentials to pull off a Bond game, and the trailers have looked sharp.
A weak theme song doesn't sink a game. Die Another Day exists and the film still made money. The song will play over the credits, fans will have opinions, and then the actual gameplay will take over the conversation.
For now, you can judge "First Light" yourself via the official lyric video on YouTube. If you want to catch up on everything confirmed about the game before launch, our latest gaming news has you covered leading up to the May 27 release date.
The game launches May 27. Whether the opening cinematic makes the song hit differently in context is genuinely worth finding out. For now, the theme is doing its job as a conversation starter, even if that conversation is mostly "yeah, it's fine." Check out more gaming coverage as the release date approaches.
