Surprise Chris Farren album! Death Don’t Wait (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is the mostly-instrumental soundtrack to a spy thriller that doesn’t exist, inspired by Marvin Gaye. As Farren explains:

I’d been listening to this album called Trouble Man, this movie soundtrack by Marvin Gaye. I thought: Man, I can’t wait for the time in my career when I’m able to do something like that. But then I thought: Well, I could just do it, and not wait, because it seems like a fun creative thing to do, to make music for movies. Maybe I won’t wait. Maybe I’ll make a soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t even exist.

Death don’t wait — and neither does Chris Farren. He scored his made-up movie in just under three months, with some help from friends and collaborators Jeff Rosenstock, Macseal’s Frankie Impastato, and AJJ’s Mark Glick, taking inspiration from Dirty Harry, Kill Bill, Chinatown, Mulholland Drive, and classic James Bond movies.

“I thought about what every action movie has,” Farren says. “There’s usually at least two car chases, maybe a boat chase, hand-to-hand combat, a heist scene. So I just chose 15 different types of scenes, and I’d watch those types of scenes in different movies. I watched a lot of bank heist scenes and scenes of people diffusing bombs, and tried to pay attention to what the music was doing, and thought about how I could do that in my own way.”

While 11 of the 12 tracks on the album are instrumental, Death Don’t Wait (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) does have its very own Bond theme ballad: “Death Don’t Wait (Main Title),” sung by the inimitable Laura Stevenson. “I didn’t want to sing on it,” Farren says. “I thought it would take away from the concept of the record if I sang on it. And the nature of the song, it wasn’t meant for my voice. It’s meant for more of a classic voice, and Laura has one of the great voices of our time, I say.”

That song now has a music video, which you can find below along with a stream of the full album.

Death Don’t Wait (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is out now via Polyvinyl. Order it here.