Stream Jonny Greenwood You Were Never Really Here Score
For a little over 10 years now, Jonny Greenwood has been carving out a whole second life for himself aside from Radiohead as an acclaimed composer. He often works in the medium of film scores, and he often specifically works with Paul Thomas Anderson, a director whose idiosyncratic and auteurist tendencies have paired nicely with the Radiohead world altogether over the years.
Most recently, they collaborated for Anderson’s beautiful and strange new film Phantom Thread, and it was one of Greenwood’s best scores yet. The music he provided for Phantom Thread is, like the film, unnerving in how pretty and dreamy it is on the surface, and just as the film invites plenty of interpretation, so too did his score give us a lot to talk about.
Greenwood was deservingly nominated for an Oscar for the score, and then he was robbed. (It’s a continuation of the Academy doing a lot of wrong by Greenwood, considering they wouldn’t nominate his titanic and haunting There Will Be Blood score on a bullshit technicality.) Of course, one would assume Greenwood doesn’t care all that much about such things, and at any rate he’s already back with another new score — this time for Lynne Ramsay’s thriller You Were Never Really Here, which got a good bit of acclaim at Cannes and stars Joaquin Phoenix.
The film doesn’t go into wide release in the US until next month, but it’s out in the UK and Greenwood’s score is now available in full, too. We’d previously heard one excerpt from it, “Dark Streets,” which hinted this might be something a little different from most of Greenwood’s scores. A sparsely throbbing synth groove with spoken word fragments, it suggested a score that, like his work for Phantom Thread, would be an exploration of different approaches than Greenwood’s older, unsettling strings-dominated work. His You Were Never Really Here score is actually a diverse set of compositions, placing dark orchestral pieces alongside synth work that ranges from ambient and chilly to more propulsive. Now you can check the whole thing out for yourself below.
The You Were Never Really Here soundtrack is out now via Invada Records.