The 10 best movie scores of 2024
Film composers outdid themselves this year, which is of a piece with the calibre of movie releases. It was, quite simply, a standout year for cinema, and these scores are just a piece of that equation.
Some of the composers who thrilled the ears of movie-goers in 2024 are known quantities. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have become the go-to duo for bold, modern soundscapes that either complement or outshine the films they appear in. Luckily, their skills were paired with impeccable precision with Luca Guadagnino’s direction. Meanwhile, there isn’t a year that goes by when Hans Zimmer’s name doesn’t get tossed around at awards season, and 2024 is no different.
However, there were several artists who made a splash this year who are much less well-known. Chanda Dancy, Raffertie, and Alex G all came forward with attention-grabbing scores that introduced them as major talents in the cinema landscape.
For a score to work, it has to blend seamlessly with the rest of the film and enhance its key elements. Like good dialogue, it should never tell an audience how to feel but stoke subconscious emotions and perceptions of the action unfolding on-screen. Each of these scores did that in spades this year despite their vastly diverging styles.
The 10 best movie soundtracks of 2024:
10. Timestalker – Toydrum
Alice Lowe set up an exceedingly devilish challenge for Toydrum when she made Timestalker. The Monty Python-style comedy centres on a self-absorbed woman who relentlessly pursues an indifferent romantic interest across several centuries. It’s a costume drama, an irreverent comedy, a sci-fi time travel film, and an ’80s spoof. Lowe collaborated with Toydrum for her first feature, Prevenge, which follows a pregnant woman who goes on a killing spree. For Timestalker, they had to be even more innovative, blending traditional and experimental sounds to reflect everything from the dawn of time to the distant future.
The instruments that the duo used for the film include synths, harpsichord, timpani, vocals, bass, piano, harpsichord, lute, and harp, along with vocals and rhythmic clapping. The result is an immersive sonic journey through time that is at turns sweeping and operatic, playful, and spare. It blends so perfectly with the action on screen that it’s easy to forget just how difficult a feat it must have been to pull off. Even an 1980s-style vocal track featuring Lowe herself pulls off the impossible task of feeling like it could actually have been a hit single.
9. Love Lies Bleeding – Clint Mansell
Movies that defy convention require a like-minded score, and director Rose Glass found the perfect collaborator in Clint Mansell. Love Lies Bleeding is a blood-soaked thriller, a pulse-pounding romance, and an atmospheric ’80s action movie with psychedelic detours into magical realism. There is also an otherworldly tone. The night sky looms over the small town of New Mexico where the story is set, with stars so bright they sparkle.
In an interview with Far Out, Glass said that she hadn’t made the connection between the surreal tone of the film and the fact that New Mexico is the UFO capital of the world until they started shooting. When she did, however, it informed how she wanted the movie to sound. The result is a lush, eerie soundscape full of a “weird, twinkly, synthy sci-fi kind of feel” that would not be out of place in a film about intergalactic alien space travel. As such, it adds yet another layer to Glass’s bold defiance of genre.
8. I Saw the TV Glow – Alex G
Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow is tough to categorise. Surreal, elusive, and often bleak, it follows a teenager whose obsession with a television show called The Pink Opaque threatens to overtake their reality. Full of gloomy neon hues and uninflected dialogue, it explores multiple forms of dysphoria. Whether it acts as an allegory for gender dysphoria or the creeping encroachment of parasocial relationships through screens is up for the viewer’s interpretation of their own experiences, but Alex G’s score plays a key role in setting the dissonant, uneasy tone.
I Saw the TV Glow is steeped in tracks from some of the most adored indie artists of the moment, including Caroline Polachek, Phoebe Bridgers, and King Woman. Their music is laced through the film like a secret code understood only by those who are in the know, just like the main characters who bond via their shared obsession with a long, cancelled underground TV show. With this competition, Alex G’s score could have felt redundant, but he created a superbly haunting soundscape full of ambient tones, lo-fi textures, and disjointed progressions that evoke teen angst taken seriously.
7. The Substance – Raffertie
It takes a particular kind of power to match the on-screen intensity of Coralie Fargeat’s body horror tour de force, The Substance. Raffertie, a classically trained composer and electronic artist, was up to the challenge, producing an eerie, pulsating soundscape that manages to reflect and intensify the aesthetic swagger of Fargeat’s imagery.
In an interview with Far Out, Raffertie said that Fargeat wanted an electronic backbone to the soundtrack but also wanted to weave in a classic, Old Hollywood feel to the world of Demi Moore’s Elisabeth, a former Oscar-winner who tries an experimental substance to gain a grotesque version of eternal youth. As a result, some of the score is in keeping with the sumptuous, nostalgic work of composers like Bernard Herrmann, making the subterranean bass loop and kick drum of the title track all the more visceral. With the tight editing of the initial reveal of the electric green substance, Raffertie’s score is foreboding, hypnotic, and electrifying all at once.
6. Nosferatu – Robin Coralan
Many viewers will have to wait until 2025 to see Robert Eggers’ hotly anticipated vampire flick, Nosferatu. Leaning heavily into the erotic undertones of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, it features a physically gruelling performance by Lily-Rose Depp and A+ facial hair from her male co-stars. Underpinning Eggers’ characteristic exploration of oppressiveness and hallucinatory mania is a score by Robin Carolan, with whom he collaborated on The Northman. Carolan uses classical instrumentation to bring the viewer into the 19th-century setting while injecting the world with the unpredictability that is always central to Eggers’ work.
Full of sweeping, ominous orchestral, quavering vocals and the eerie tinkling of a music box, Carolan’s score is steeped in the sonic language of the horror genre, but it is full of romance as well. At more than eight minutes, the track ‘Daybreak’ stands out, building from quietly ominous suspense to a frenzied crescendo that pulls at your heartstrings as much as your nerves. Sweepingly romantic and terrifying in equal measure, Carolan’s score is a perfect complement to Eggers’ bold take on a classic narrative.
5. Blink Twice – Chanda Dancy
The score for Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut is shorter than many others, totaling a mere 18 minutes over 11 tracks, but sometimes short and sweet is best. The film has been praised for its tense pacing and visual flair, and neither of these elements would be nearly as effective if it wasn’t for the work of Chanda Dancy.
Creating a sonic atmosphere in psychological thrillers is a tricky needle to thread. The composer must ratchet the tension with near-scientific precision without becoming emotionally manipulative or overwhelming the on-screen action. Dancy’s score features a mixture of spine-chillingly ominous electronic sounds with light, staccato orchestral that feel almost as if they belong in a Jane Austen drama. These contrasts dovetail with the action on-screen, in which a young woman is swept up into the romance of a glitzy island getaway with a tech billionaire, only to become increasingly uneasy and suspicious about her lapses in memory. Dancy’s soundtrack offers a slow creep of horror peppered with a foghorn bass of warning. When all hell breaks loose, dissonant, shrieking strings fuel the panic.
4. Dune: Part 2 – Hans Zimmer
It is practically an annual tradition at this point that Hans Zimmer’s name comes up during awards season. Over the years, he’s created some of cinema’s most iconic modern scores, from Pirates of the Caribbean and Inception to Blade Runner: 2049 and Interstellar. His work has defined the sound of 21st-century cinema, and he’s been nominated for a whopping 12 Oscars. However, you won’t be seeing his name this year, at least not for his characteristically virtuosic work in Dune: Part Two. This is because the Academy has disqualified it for its reuse of music from the first film, which, incidentally, earned him an Oscar in 2022.
Zimmer’s score is integral in immersing the viewer in Arrakis, making the far-off world feel atmospheric and emotionally resonant rather than alienating and overly elaborate. At turns softly haunting, foreboding, and propulsive, it is yet another example of Zimmer’s unparalleled mastery of sonic world-building. According to director Denis Villeneuve, the track ‘A Time of Quiet Between the Storms’, which is used as a backdrop for the haunting love story between Paul Atreides and Chani, brought him to tears when he first heard it. “I wanted something heartbreaking and the most beautiful love theme ever written,” the director told The Radio Times. “And honestly, I think he did it.”
3. Wild Robot – Kris Bowers
Kris Bowers won an Oscar for his documentary short film, The Last Repair Shop, which followed a group of craftspeople in Los Angeles who repair musical instruments for the city’s school children. He may be headed for another Oscar soon for his score for DreamWorks’ animated feature, The Wild Robot. The story follows a shipwrecked cyborg who washes up on an uninhabited island and finds a family in the animals who live there. It’s full of tenderness, wonder, and universal questions about death, nature versus technology, parenthood, and identity.
Like many of the best-animated movies, Wild Robot often feels like a silent film, relying on visual and musical elements instead of wordy dialogue. Bowers’ score envelops the story in playfulness, suspense, melancholy, and warmth. He wanted to draw on the movie’s themes by blending organic and synthetic sounds, so he teamed up with Sandbox Percussion, an ensemble that uses wooden planks, oxygen tanks, and scrap metal to create their music. Layering it with electronic elements provided the film with its immersive sound and provided the gateway into the story.
2. Conclave – Volker Bertelmann
The premise of Edward Berger’s Conclave seems contradictory – a thriller set in the staid world of the papacy. Thanks in large part to Volker Bertelmann’s pitch-perfect score, however, it is one of the most gripping suspense films of the year. Starring Ralph Fiennes, the film centres on the secretive and ancient tradition of choosing a new pope. Politics, betrayal, and the overwhelming lure of power cloud the proceedings and call the purpose of the task into question.
Bertelmann’s score hinges on silence. Like the greatest horror films, it contains no shortage of jumpscares, weaving a constant sense of unease, unpredictability, and danger into the story that asserts the darkness and peril writhing under the surface of a supposedly stuffy occasion.
Speaking to Far Out, Bertelmann explained that he found novel ways to walk the line between the formality of the setting and the precariousness of the action. “I played traditional old instruments where I maybe played chords that were Bach chords, but they were destroyed by a plastic piece of paper that was lying on the strings,” he said. “I did a lot of stuff with cellos, but I used them in a way that they were just snapping, or rubbing. These moaning sounds from the cello and strings… I wanted to find a sound that is maybe a little bit of a yearning of a human, of a human moaning.”
1. Challengers – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have become the hottest film score duo in Hollywood. They’ve already won two Oscars, one for scoring David Fincher’s The Social Network and the other for scoring the Disney film Soul. There’s a reason they’re in such high demand. They have a knack for getting to the heart of the emotion of a film while adding a stylistic shimmer so powerful it can compensate for lazy direction. Luckily, Luca Guadagnino’s filmmaking is anything but lazy, and Justin Kuritzkes’ script is as snappy as the characters’ backhand serves.
Challengers centres on a love triangle that hinges on the game of tennis. It’s spicy, steamy, and smart, and Reznor and Ross’s score goes big, featuring pounding rave-like techno music. It’s a propulsive, dance-worthy soundscape that perfectly captures the layers of lust at the heart of the story. Interspersed with the club-heavy tracks are soft piano progressions that are just as hypnotic. It’s the duo’s best score to date.
