Hey, let's try to guess the plot of Stranger Things 2 just by looking at its soundtrack titles
[Note: This article contains song titles and descriptions of songs off the Stranger Things season 2 soundtrack, some of which probably count as spoilers for the upcoming show. Our baseless speculation about them is probably way off, but who knows: we might luck out and accidentally get something right.]
We’re less than a week out from the October 27 launch of the second season of Stranger Things (or Stranger Things 2, as Netflix continues to insist we sequel-fy it), and anticipation for the show’s return is running high. Yesterday, the streaming service stoked it even higher by releasing the new soundtrack for the season, once again contributed by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, of Austin-based synth band Survive. And while it’s just as good as the first season’s—spacey and mysterious as ever—we’ll admit we’re even more fascinated by the track titles that accompany each song.
After all, looking back over the titles for the first season’s soundtrack—and with the benefit of a ton of hindsight—it’s possible to eke out the barest understanding of the original plot; we go from tracks like “Nancy And Barb,” “Kids,” and “Joyce And Lonnie Fighting,” to more ominous titles like “The Upside Down,” “Castle Byers,” and “Hawkins Lab.” Admittedly, none of these would have made a lick of sense before we’d seen the show, but that’s no reason not to try to baselessly speculate on what season 2's soundtrack selections might mean, too.
First, the easy stuff: We already knew the show would be dipping into an urban center for its opening, so that’s presumably “Chicago.” “Eggo In The Snow” feels like a callback to the end of season one, with Hopper leaving some guilt-waffles out for a dimensionally stranded Eleven. Similarly, there’s “She Wants Me To Find Her,” a tranquil, moody little song that’s presumably about the search for Millie Bobby Brown’s beloved psychic kid.
But what are we to make of “Birth/Rescue,” which goes absolutely nuts in its last 20 seconds? (Except that maybe it goes with this clip, of Eleven escaping back into reality via a hole that looks like an inter-dimensional birth canal.) Or the ominous “Symptoms,” which riffs on the show’s original theme? “Descent Into The Rift” is even crazier, all honking bass blasts that suggest this “Rift” place isn’t really somewhere you want to descend into. “The Hub” doesn’t sound much safer.
There’s also an ongoing theme of deception—maybe linked to Hopper’s decisions at the end of the show’s first season? We start with the relatively light “The First Lie,” which is followed by the more somber and serious “ I Never Should Have Lied.” (“It’s A Trap,” meanwhile, just sounds unrepentedly fucked up.)
The whole 34-song soundtrack is available on Spotify and Apple Music, so fans of the show are free to do their own probably-pointless fortune telling, too. Meanwhile, you can take a listen to the very last track on the album—titled, point-blank, “To Be Continued”—and decide for yourself whether things in Hawkins are likely to fully resolve themselves before the season is out.