On the instant cult classic Yellowjackets, high school trauma devolves into a surreal horror show. The year is 1996. A plane carrying a girls soccer team crashes into the remote Canadian wilderness, leaving the survivors stranded for 19 months. The psychological warfare of adolescence slowly, painfully gives way to madness and then… cannibalism. As the first season of Yellowjackets reveals what went down in those woods, it flashes to the present-day lives of four team members, now in their early forties and battling their demons. But much of the show’s aesthetic pulls spiritually from, and nods to, the 1990s: the casting of alternative “it” girls of the era, Juliette Lewis and Christina Ricci (in a total reinvention), as grown-up survivors Natalie and Misty; the way Hole, PJ Harvey, Liz Phair, and Belly needle-drops just feel right, or how the characters keep their sanity by getting down to a cassette of Montell Jordan’s high-school dance staple “This Is How We Do It.” The opening credits even make VHS static feel edgy again.
That last part may have something to do with the show’s grungy theme song, “No Return,” written and performed by two actual ’90s vets: Anna Waronker of the bubblegum alt-rock band that dog. and Craig Wedren of the glammy post-hardcore group Shudder to Think. Both have worked as film and television composers for years—Waronker on projects like Josie and the Pussycats and Wedren on everything from The State to School of Rock to GLOW—but after meeting through a mutual friend in L.A. the pair teamed up to do the music for Hulu’s Shrill in 2019, followed by the CW drama The Republic of Sarah earlier this year. “Each of our projects is like an album for our special side band,” says Waronker. If Shrill was the duo’s pop album and The Republic of Sarah a Radiohead-style art-drama, then Yellowjackets is their angsty goth record, with a side of the supernatural. “The show goes from drama to weird comedy to pure horror to existential dread—a kaleidoscope of tones and genres,” adds Wedren. Which is to say, it’s never a boring day at work.
Nearly every episode in season one features some kind of shocking revelation, with the upcoming finale promising a major jaw-dropper. Waronker and Wedren crank up the tension with an original score that adds an eerie undercurrent to a wide variety of nightmarish scenes, including one in which a teenager gives birth to a rotisserie chicken. But the ideal showcase of their talents remains “No Return,” one of the show’s few original compositions with vocals. The song—which sounds a little like a haunted, organ-heavy Breeders track—recently made its way to streaming services, with a Yellowjackets soundtrack on the way. “Everybody keeps asking for a full-length version,” says Wedren, “but a theme song is like a hardcore track: you’re fitting a full arc into between 30 and 90 seconds. You gotta get it all in and move on.”
Anna Waronker: We were in the same room so many times without even knowing because our bands would cross over quite a bit. But we officially met through a dear friend whose son was going to preschool with Craig’s son. Then our kids went to the same school and we just started hanging out for fun.
Craig Wedren: Maybe every 10 years I’ve been lucky enough to meet somebody where I’m instantly like, “You don’t know it yet but we’re going to do so much great stuff together.” We started talking about our respective band experiences at a mutual friend’s party and it was terrifyingly parallel. For years, we were looking for the right first project to do together and Shrill was clearly the one. We have similar pop, melody, scores, and comedy sensibilities.
AW: After a couple years of doing Shrill, we wanted to do something gnarly. So we did The Republic of Sarah. During that we got the itch to do something crazy and scary, although I don’t like scary!
CW: I love scary. Because of my past work, I was getting a lot of calls for comedies. But if you’ve ever heard Shudder to Think or that dog. there’s this fractal, spiky thing to both of them, even though they are different-sounding bands. We wanted to do something that is closer to music we would naturally make.
CW: Our mutual friend [director and executive producer] Karyn Kusama sent me the pilot, which was composed by Theodore Shapiro, who I did Wet Hot American Summer with so many years ago. It was gorgeous, a perfectly set table that I wanted to tip over. When the show got picked up for series and [Shapiro] couldn’t do it, Karyn got in touch with me. Initially, they just hired me. I felt very strongly that not only would it be the perfect thing for me and Anna, but that it needed a female voice because of the nature of the show.
AW: The first task was handling the opening scene of the second episode, which is the plane crash. When Craig asked if I wanted to do the show I said, “I would love to. I can do blood but I cannot work on the plane crash.” Flying anxiety ruined my touring career. I still haven’t seen that episode. When we worked on it, I looked down! I can score the skinning of a rabbit but…
CW: It’s so rare to get a project where every day you’re like, I can’t believe they’re not just letting us do this, they’re encouraging us to go even further. I was initially a little ambivalent, having been through so many experiences where the party line from producers is usually “go wild, we want you to be really creative,” and then in reality they just want more pizzicato.
CW: They weren’t sure if they wanted a theme song. It’s rare to hear one these days.
AW: It’s almost a retro move at this point. “Mother Mother” by Tracy Bonham was used as the temp music, and that was really cool. But it would have just been a snippet. We didn’t know it was going to be a song-song for a while.
CW: We had written different styles of end credits that were ’90s-inspired through a 2021 lens.
AW: What ended up happening was that they loved all the different ideas, but wanted them as one.
CW: We started building off the more atmospheric, cinematic version.
AW: It was like Radiohead and David Lynch made a theme song. It had background vocals, the opera thing, and the weird noises.
CW: We loved that one because it added a spectral dimension to the score while still feeling like it belonged. There was another that was more like snotty Sonic Youth with a go-go beat, and we started adapting that one with the cinematic one. It started turning into this Jesus Lizard thing. At one point I worried it sounded too much like Girls Against Boys. It had this whole ’90s Chicago thing, which we loved for the show, but is also very rigid and masculine. [They Might Be Giants’] “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” vocal line also played a part somewhere along the line.
AW: The vocal hook eventually softened it, I started dragging out the phrasing a little bit.
CW: Then we found that B-52’s Farfisa sound, which helped sell the “mean guy” vibe. It needed that punishing beat underneath while also being more phantasmagorical on top.
AW: It feels so rebellious, all of those different factors lead you to this feeling of, Fuck you, I’m gonna jump a fence and smoke a cigarette!
AW: The lyrics were written really quickly, which was how I started writing music, just like barking things out. We knew they needed to come from a place where things were immediate and rolling off the tongue. We’re both seasoned songwriters, we know how to labor over lyrics, but we had to just be 19 again.
CW: Because of our day jobs, we’re often writing songs and lyrics on assignment. But this was such a treat because it was really asking us to do the original thing that we both did for many years. It wasn’t hard to dip back into that. Plus it needed to have that sort of ’90s thing where the lyrics only feel like they make sense.
AW: I was a little grumpy when I recorded the vocals, which was probably good because I was a very grumpy teenager. It was a little weird to sing lead because Craig and I love to sing together when we work, we have a really cool vocal blend. A lot of the songs I wrote when I was younger came out of angst and depression, so it was easy to channel that when working on this. Also, I had just done a new that dog. record after 20,000 years so that was an interesting way of cracking my vault open. Like, what happens when you go back to that mindset?
CW: There’s also a Gen X-specific blasé attitude, like you’re at arm’s length but clearly very passionate about everything. I suppose that’s in vogue because the ’90s are… back?
AW: For me, it’s not a ’90s thing—it’s timeless.
AW: I truly became obsessed with the show by episodes nine and 10. I think those are the best episodes. Everything that goes on takes the show to a whole new level. By episode seven we were like, How are they gonna answer all our questions by the end of the season?! With episode nine, we realized they’re not—we’re going to need 10 seasons. I haven’t felt this way about a show since Twin Peaks!
