Stream Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’ Score For David Fincher’s Mank
A decade ago, Nine Inch Nails bandmates Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross began a whole new stage of their careers, jumping into the film-scoring world with their Oscar-winning work on David Fincher’s The Social Network. Since then, Reznor and Ross have scored the Fincher films The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl, and they’ve become two of the most in-demand film and TV composers out there, moving themselves into EGOT range. (Most recently, they did the score for the upcoming Pixar film SOUL, which is quite a leap from Nine Inch Nails.) Today, Netflix has released Fincher’s new movie Mank, his first in seven years. Once again, Reznor and Ross have done the movie’s soundtrack, and they’ve also released their Mank score, which they’ve teased a couple of times, as an album.
Mank, widely considered to be an Oscar favorite, is a film about Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and his battles with director Orson Welles. Fincher went out of his way to make Mank look like a movie from the early-’40s era that he depicts, shooting it in black-and-white. With their score, Reznor and Ross have clearly worked to make sure the music also reflects the era.
On first listen — I haven’t seen the movie yet — the Reznor/Ross Mank score is steeped in big-band jazz and melodramatic orchestral music. There’s a sense of Hitchcockian suspense to some of the tracks, but you shouldn’t expect any ominous synth-tones or electronic tick-tock percussion. Instead, a lot of this sounds like Count Basie. The Mank score has 52 tracks, and it lasts 93 minutes. If you like, you can hear the whole thing below.
Mank is streaming on Netflix now, and the Mank score is out on the Null Corporation.