12 great original film scores from rock musicians who became composers

For a film set in the near future about a romance between a lonely man and his digital assistant, the score for Her sounds relatively warm and grounded. Director Spike Jonze wanted to create a moody feeling not bound by any particular space or time, and the constantly beguiling music throughout the film reflects that aim. Although the band name Arcade Fire is credited as one of the contributors to the score, it’s mostly the work of band member Will Butler, alongside Canadian musician Owen Pallett (who has worked with them as an arranger and live performer on tour). For some reason, the score wasn’t officially made available to the public until 2021, six years after the film’s release and nomination for Best Original Score.

Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin is a disturbing meditation on human nature from the perspective of a predatory alien observer in the form of Scarlet Johansson. For a film this unsettling, a traditional, pretty-sounding score would not do. Enter British singer-songwriter Mica Levi, also known by the stage name Micachu. Through experimental tuning and dissonant sounds, Levi’s breakthrough score for Under The Skin skillfully conveys the sense that the main character is constantly out of sync with the rest of the world. They achieve this feeling through sustained electronic notes of varying pitch, whining viola, rhythmic drums, or percussive sounds that aren’t immediately identifiable (some of which were created by clashing microphones together). At times it’s oppressively dark, other times glaringly bright, but always just slightly uncomfortable. As it should be for a film like this.

We catch up again with Sakamoto much later in his career, on another collaborative venture with two distinctive artists. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu originally brought Ryuichi Sakamoto onto his production of The Revenant as its sole composer, but Sakamoto was recovering from throat cancer at the time and was concerned about taking on the project by himself. He enlisted the help of German artist Alva Noto (also known as Carsten Nicolai) as well as Bryce Dessner, of the indie band The National. Because the score is the work of three individual composers it was deemed ineligible for an Academy Award nomination (a rule that apparently didn’t apply when Sakamoto shared the award for The Last Emperor), which it arguably deserved. The slow, deliberate build of sustained chords and ambient sounds evokes the film’s snowy wilderness setting so acutely that listening to it immediately takes you right back there again.

It’s hard to pick just one standout film score by Radiohead lead guitarist and keyboardist Jonny Greenwood, since each one is as singular as the films they accompany. His work on the more recent films of Paul Thomas Anderson is especially exquisite. As tempting as it is to single out There Will Be Blood for its percussive strings and discordant orchestrations, or The Power Of The Dog or The Master for their individual brilliance, it’s Anderson’s Phantom Thread that best demonstrates Greenwood’s skill for creating a soundscape so thematically coordinated with the visuals it becomes an integral part of the film itself. Greenwood’s romantic, nostalgic compositions start off beautifully before descending into something much darker. With a different score, Phantom Thread would be a much different film.

Perhaps more than any other genre, horror is majorly reliant on sound to set a mood. That’s why so many horror scores have become iconic—think of Halloween or The Exorcist and you can hear their themes in your head. In his chilling score for Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Colin Stetson shifts gentle harmonic progressions into waves of intimidating sound so subtly you barely notice what’s happening until it nearly overwhelms you. Kind of like the film. Before becoming a film composer, Stetson, a gifted saxophonist, performed with a number of music acts, including Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio, and Bon Iver. He’s also released several acclaimed solo albums. The dissonance between the sound of a raspy saxophone droning underneath a string-heavy orchestra is a pretty good characterization of his film work. It’s the perfect complement to an atmospheric film like Hereditary, designed to elicit feelings of anxiety and suspense in the audience.

The score for Killers Of The Flower Moon was the last one completed by Robbie Robertson, who passed away in August 2023, just before the film’s wide release in October. He was posthumously nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score at the Academy Awards this year. Robertson, a former guitarist for Bob Dylan, was best known for his work The Band and later as a solo artist. He got into film composing through Killers director Martin Scorsese after working with him on The Last Waltz, a documentary about The Band’s final concert. Robertson wrote several great scores for Scorsese’s films, including Raging Bull, Casino, and Gangs Of New York, but as a member of the First Nations community, Killers was a project close to his heart. Eschewing a stereotypical approach to the music, he referenced quintessentially American genres, with touches of blues, gospel, and folk, woven together with indigenous instruments and rhythms. It’s an incredible final achievement that cements his legacy as one of the great musicians and composers of our time.