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When you listen to as much music as we do, you notice it everywhere—especially in movies and on TV, where the soundtrack is more important than ever. Our monthly column runs through the most memorable recent examples of where music and visual media meet.
New York punks Dollhouse (and Pharmakon!) bring real hardcore to the surreal Severance
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Everything about Severance—the Apple TV+ series that’s a cross between Office Space and THX-1138—is just a little bit off, from the maze-like set design to the Easter eggs hidden among the office props. So the fact that a back-alley punk gig in Episode 6 (“Hide and Seek”) looked less like a real hardcore show and more like something you might have seen on an old episode of Chips—exuberantly colored mohawks, glowering dudes with face tats—was probably not a production misstep; the fakeness was most likely the point. But once the band started playing, it was clear that they weren’t fake: The song, “I Hate Lumon,” may have been written as a plot point about the company where the characters work, but the sheer fury the band brought to the performance suggested that these were seasoned players from the scene. And in fact, they are: IMDB reveals the bandmembers to be singer Michael Caiazzo, guitarist Tye Miller, drummer Charles Henry Wood, and bassist Margaret Chardiet, all of whom play in New York’s Dollhouse. (Their recent EP The First Day of Spring is every bit as blistering as their turn on the show.) Chardiet, of course, is best known for her solo noise project Pharmakon. Come to think of it, Severance—in the context of knives, limbs, and copious gore—would be a pretty great title for a new Pharmakon album, too. –Philip Sherburne
Watch: Apple TV+
Lorde says “shhh” and starts a saga
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In Petite Maman, the latest film from director Céline Sciamma that hit theaters last month, a little girl meets and befriends another girl building a fort in the woods behind her family’s house. She then discovers that she’s gone back in time, and has actually met her mother as a child (both characters are played by twins). A Miyazaki-style fairy tale told with grounded tenderness, the film bridges the gap between children and their parents with elegant, touching simplicity. Toward the end of the film, when the pair are spending their final hours together before the daughter has to return to her own time, the mother asks her to share the music of the future. She plays her a joyous synthpop song on headphones, made specifically for the film by the French producer and songwriter Para One, Sciamma’s longtime collaborator. Sung by a children’s choir and cresting in a blitz of synths, the song is the only instance of music in the film. It sounds as though it could be beamed in from both the 1980s or the 2020s, neatly translating the roving emotion at the core of Petite Maman’s time-traveling story. –Eric Torres
The “Grunge Frasier” parody is perfect
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What if after a long day of talk radio therapy, Dr. Frasier Crane wanted to unwind in the pit at a Pearl Jam show? How would he feel if he’d heard wrong and it was actually an early Temple of the Dog set? How would he react to his father’s brash Stone Temple Pilots fandom? Comedian and writer Jon Blair’s strong understanding of the ’90s sitcom Frasier’s characters, cadence, and reliable narrative beats is why “Grunge Frasier” is such exhilarating fanfiction. All this and more are explored in a two-minute storyboard performance that includes not one but two exceptional sitcom-ready Layne Staley puns. –Evan Minsker
The most affecting musical moment on this season of Atlanta comes courtesy of a scraggly Paper Boi fan who sounds like Grizzly Bear
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Though Atlanta’s main narrative this season follows Brian Tyree Henry’s Paper Boi on a successful European tour, there are barely any shots of the rapper actually performing onstage. As is often the case with this show, it’s more about the awkward moments that surround stardom—in the green room or at a bullshit press conference. In fact, the season’s most memorable musical performance thus far doesn’t even come from Paper Boi, but rather a mysterious Paper Boi stan named Wiley.
In the fifth episode, “Cancer Attack,” Paper Boi’s phone is stolen backstage and everyone suspects Wiley is the one who took it. This leads to a series of wonderfully strange and funny interrogation scenes in which Wiley, played with unsettling nerviness by up-and-comer Samuel Blenkin, trembles, stammers, and, at one point, farts in front of his favorite rapper. At the episode’s climax, Paper Boi and Wiley have a one-on-one conversation where Paper Boi admits he’s worried about losing touch with his artistic muse, and Wiley attests to an uncanny connection with his hero’s loneliness, one that goes beyond empathy to reach a kind of cosmic mirroring. The interaction brings up all kinds of knotty ideas about race and fandom and the transcendence of art: Is it really possible for this scrawny white ghost from Budapest to make such a genuine connection with Paper Boi only through his hard-nosed Atlanta trap music?
The show attempts to answer this question with an original song that Wiley sings directly to his hero while playing an acoustic guitar. It’s a haunting tune that recalls the skewed folk of Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen. In a voice that is painfully vulnerable one second and strident the next, Wiley sings of looming omens and a fateful untethering. “I don’t want more… of… you,” he quivers. As Paper Boi watches the odd figure before him reflect his own aching, his eyelids seem to flutter back a tear. –Ryan Dombal
A brotherly singalong is the least Michael Bay thing about Ambulance
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The bank-robbing antiheroes of Ambulance, Michael Bay’s latest testosterone fest (now in theaters), shred the streets of L.A. as they slip past choppers and squad cars in their hijacked EMT van, racking up a hefty body count. When things get a little too hectic, Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) digs out his AirPods and cues up Christopher Cross’ 1979 ballad “Sailing.” He hands one earbud to his partner Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), and the brothers belt together in one of the strangest singalongs ever filmed. It’s so warped, warm, and perversely funny, you almost forget you’re watching a batshit Michael Bay movie. –Madison Bloom
Everything Everywhere All at Once achieves galaxy brain poignancy
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As Ryan Dombal wrote in his Listening Diary interview with lead actor Stephanie Hsu: Everything Everywhere All at Once takes great pleasure in mashing up film genres and emotions as it zips through universes, with directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Schienert absorbing the freneticism of modern culture and tossing it right back at the audience. Think The Matrix, but with a handmade sensibility reminiscent of French auteur Michel Gondry. It’s a superhero story. It’s a family drama. It’s about immigrant identity and queer acceptance. It will make you laugh like an idiot before it takes the oddest possible route to a kind of galaxy brain poignancy.
The score to the new Viking drama The Northman is as heart-pumping as its battle scenes
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As Madison Bloom wrote in her interview with The Northman composers Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough: 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.”
Alex G’s brooding score to We’re All Going to the World’s Fair amplifies its online horror
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As Eric Torres wrote in his review of Alex G’s score: In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the debut film from director Jane Schoenbrun, the internet is both a safe haven for expression and a terrifying realm of artificiality. The plot follows Casey, a lonely teenager who immerses herself in a horror role-playing game called the World’s Fair Challenge and begins to upload progressively eerier videos of herself online. Soon, she draws the attention of an older man. As their uneasy relationship grows over Skype calls that teeter between fact and fiction, the fragmented narrative shifts from creepypasta horror to drifting mumblecore to harrowing drama, intimately exploring the way self-identity is both established and ruptured online. In World’s Fair, even the loading time between clips in an endless YouTube autoplay stream comes loaded with atmospheric dread.
Schoenbrun’s film is highly attuned to sound: clacking keyboards, the beeping timer on a Photo Booth recording, and gentle, sleep-inducing ASMR help establish World’s Fair’s deeply online mood. Schoenbrun also listened to the music of Alex Giannascoli, aka Alex G, while writing the script, and eventually they recruited the Philadelphia songwriter to compose an original score. Giannascoli is a natural fit, an enigmatic artist whose impressionistic lyrics and scuffed indie rock taps into the same suburban ennui that Schoenbrun captures in World’s Fair. Strip malls, empty parking lots, and dirty snow banks make the setting of the film chillingly universal; Giannascoli’s homespun music amplifies the melancholic beauty that hovers at the edges of those haunted scenes.
