In director Robert Eggers’ merciless new Viking epic The Northman, violence has its own rhythm. It’s in the gallop of war horses, the clash of broadswords, the thud of arrows biting into muscle. Far from the cursed 17th-century homestead in Eggers’ 2015 debut The Witch or the tight confines of his 2019 mindfuck The Lighthouse, The Northman is a mammoth film—a mythic tale of blood feuds and the cruelty of fate.
So when Eggers enlisted Robin Carolan (who shepherded some of the 2010s’ most ominous sounds as the founder of Tri Angle Records) and Sebastian Gainsborough (best known as the avant-garde electronic producer Vessel) to compose the film’s score, he also tasked them with maintaining its savagery. “The world of The Northman is hard,” Carolan says. “Everything is covered in dirt and everyone looks rough, so the score had to mirror the hardship of being alive at that time.”
Set in Iceland circa 900 AD, the film follows Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) on a quest to avenge his father (Ethan Hawke), who was slain by his traitorous brother before young Amleth’s eyes. As Amleth grows older—and much beefier—he swears to return home to rescue his mother (Nicole Kidman) and cut down his wicked uncle, as prophesied by a blind seeress played by Björk. It’s a Hero’s Journey as old as time. But Eggers’ tale, which he penned with Icelandic poet and Björk collaborator Sjón, has none of the triumphant gleam that marks so many revenge sagas. And its score doesn’t soar on winged trumpets and victory bells—like the film, it feels crusted over with soil, sulfur, and dried blood.
For their first-ever film score, Carolan and Gainsborough found themselves charting new musical terrain. Though their own shadowy music has mostly been created with synthesizers and modern production techniques, the composers were restricted to a handful of archaic instruments. Eggers is known for his painstaking replications of the past; the clapboard farmhouse in The Witch was built using only period hand tools. In keeping with this meticulousness, Carolan and Gainsborough consulted the renowned Danish musician and ethnographer Poul Høxbro, and wrote on esoteric instruments such as the lyre-like tagelharpa and the langspil, an Icelandic drone zither. These unfamiliar sounds lend The Northman a necessary strangeness, as the film is suspended between earthly woes and Norse mythology.
The Northman, as Carolan puts it, is “smothered in music.” In addition to the medieval instruments, the composers recorded a large string ensemble, a choir, and a band of percussionists. But unlike, say, the heroic soundtrack for the 1982 Viking classic Conan the Barbarian, the music of The Northman can be bowel-shuddering, shrill, and nightmarish. Carolan and Gainsborough worked on the score nonstop for about 18 months, writing through lockdown. “I’m just constantly amazed at the fact that we did it,” Gainsborough says. “And we didn’t get fired.”
Carolan concurs. “I feel really proud that we were able to come up with something that Rob’s happy with. I wouldn’t say he’s easy to please.”
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Robin Carolan: He made us a huge playlist that would’ve taken us like 18 months just to listen to—a lot of really weird, two-instrument drone music, and then more classic stuff like Ligeti and Penderecki.
Sebastian Gainsborough: There was a lot of Tuvan music as well, like throat singing.
Carolan: We recorded a couple of throat singers. Some were doing more gravelly, growly stuff. And then the Tuvan throat singing…
Gainsborough: It’s got more harmonics in it, so it can sound really rich. It’s a bit higher as well, kind of like a whistle.
Carolan: We did a lot of experimenting with horns. It’s a bit of a trope in a lot of period pieces to have that sustained horn note being the war cry. But we researched and came to the conclusion that the opening cue should be loads of horns going off all over the place. They’re all doing something slightly out of whack with the other. And it’s to do with the theory that they wouldn’t have played just one long note, because that wouldn’t reach your enemies very effectively. So they have this cacophony of sounds, and your enemies wouldn’t be able to miss that.
Carolan: Initially we weren’t going to use modern strings. But because the nature of the film kept changing, and it kept getting bigger and more emotional, we kind of felt like, “Well, we have to write big string-ensemble stuff for at least parts of this.”
Gainsborough: We had a massive string session, with maybe 30 or so players. That was a bit terrifying.
Carolan: There’s a part of the film where someone spikes the soup and everyone is hallucinating, and we wanted the string ensemble to mimic this old archaic instrument called a bullroarer, which is basically a small wooden plank on a string that they would whirl around their heads and use in rituals and battle. It makes this really odd roaring sound, but it’s not super musical. So we were asking the string ensemble to play like that, but they were just like, “What is this?”
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Carolan: It was quite nice, in some respects, that we didn’t know how to play a lot of these instruments—though I’m sure an expert langspil player will be appalled by what we’ve done. We’re also really lucky because Seb’s partner Rakhi Singh, who’s an incredible violinist, would be in and out of the studio. We’d say, “Would you be able to play this on this obscure Icelandic instrument?” Since it was a string instrument, she could make it work, even though we’re pretty sure the langspil’s not being played the way it should be played. But we got these amazing sounds out of those experiments.
Carolan: It’s just to do with archeological evidence. Drums, being animal skins, would’ve rotted away. So they don’t find them, and then it’s like, “Maybe they didn’t use them.” We wanted it to feel authentic, but at the end of the day, it’s a big film and it also has to function for a modern audience. So the idea of having that big village invasion scene without drums, it would’ve been surreal—maybe surreal in an amazing way, but it just wasn’t working for this.
Gainsborough: I can actually remember a point when we were having academic conversations with various people and being like, “Maybe we won’t use any drums, because the jury’s out on whether there were drums.” We were a bit titillated by the idea. Then we saw the film and it was like, “Drums everywhere, get the Taikos out!”
Carolan: Those were hard. The music has to be very functional—the goal is to get the adrenaline up. There’s a weird pressure involved in that, because if you see an action film, and the music is not keeping pace, and that makes the scene fail, it’s kind of your fault.
The invasion scene was tricky to score because Robert directed it in a way where it’s almost like one long continuous shot. It’s chaos, but you have to somehow control it. With that scene, because you are basically just following Amleth the entire time, we wanted the music to feel like it’s in his chest, so it’s super repetitive. Seb and I talked about how when you go to a club like Berghain at a certain time in the night, it’s just like, “duh duh duh duh duh duh duh.” There isn’t a lot going on, but it takes you over and you’re almost in a trance where you feel like everything’s propulsive. So with that cue, we were thinking a lot about club music and how sometimes less is more and you don’t need a lot to get the heart going.
