A24 shares new song from stellar I Saw The TV Glow soundtrack
"Riding Around In The Dark" by Florist is now available to download. The full soundtrack drops May 10.
Donnie Darko crashed into theaters a little over twenty years ago, bringing with it one of cinema’s all-time great soundtracks—one that still resonates all these years later. This May, A24 and director Jane Schoenbrun are hoping to provide the same for a new generation with their soundtrack to I Saw The TV Glow, a gorgeous meditation on youth, identity, and obsession disguised as a neon-lit horror flick.
While the full album featuring original tracks from Caroline Polachek, Sloppy Jane and Phoebe Bridgers, King Woman, Bartees Strange, and more drops May 10, the studio released a melancholy but very beautiful song called “Riding Around In The Dark” by the band Florist a little early today. “It’s the end of the world, and we’re driving around… you know the things that I said in the parking lot,” lead vocalist Emily Sprague sings over a cozy acoustic track, encapsulating the deeply nostalgic, if painful, pouring of your heart out to a friend after bedtime in the suburbs, and the heavy silence that comes afterward when neither of you know what to say—or have to say anything at all.
“Reading the script for I Saw the TV Glow immediately took me back to my own teenage years. Growing up in a small town, never feeling like I belonged, and being obsessed with the liminal spaces between fiction and reality,” Sprague said of the song in a press release. “I used to drive around at night and soak in these coming-of-age emotional tidal waves, dreaming about the world beyond my doorstep while simultaneously feeling a sense of ominous darkness. I wanted to try capturing that feeling in our song for the film. In many ways it defines what being young meant to me. Believing that the world is ending but somehow still living in it.”
This soundtrack is sure to make waves in both the film and music communities when it finally releases. “Early on in the process, I pitched A24 and basically said, ‘I want to make the best soundtrack of all time,’” Schoenbrun said of the creative process earlier this year (via Rolling Stone). “I’m so excited for it to come out, because I put an absurd amount of obsessive love into trying to make a soundtrack that could stand alongside Donnie Darko, or Garden State, or those early Wes Anderson and old John Hughes soundtracks, where you want to return to the movie because of the music and you want to return to the music because of the movie.” Having already seen the film, this author can say with absolute confidence that Schoenbrun pulled it off.
You can also check out yeule’s great, synth-heavy cover of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” which opens the film and was also released in advance of the full tracklist, in the following video. The album’s full track list is below.
- yeule – Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl
- Frances Quinlan – Another Season
- Caroline Polachek – Starburned and Unkissed
- Florist – Riding Around in the Dark
- Bartees Strange – Big Glow
- Maria BC – Taper
- King Woman – Psychic Wound
- Jay Som – If I Could
- L’Rain – Green
- The Weather Station – Moonlight
- Drab Majesty – Photograph
- Proper – The 90s
- Sadurn – How Can I Get Out?
- King Woman – Bury
- Sloppy Jane (ft. Phoebe Bridgers) – Claw Machine