Schoenbrun explained that when they brought their idea for the soundtrack to A24, the studio was excited. “I don’t think that a lot of filmmakers are as big contemporary music nerds as I am, and I think internally they had been trying to do more music stuff,” they said. A24 established a music arm, A24 Music, in 2021, and is releasing an album of Talking Heads covers this month in conjunction with its restoration and rerelease of Stop Making Sense. The studio declined to comment further.

Loading

For Schoenbrun, the experience of building out the soundtrack, which mostly features original songs, was a creative endeavor unto itself: They chose the artists, many of whom are queer, with the idea of codifying scenes of musicians they believed were worthy of teen obsession. They made each artist a 10-song Spotify playlist for inspiration. Then Schoenbrun spent more than a year and a half listening to the resulting submissions in different orders. (They firmly believe that a soundtrack should not feature the music in the same order in which it appears in the film.) “I really did feel like, ‘Oh I’m giving myself the best gift ever,’” they said. “‘I get to make a mixtape that doesn’t exist yet from scratch’.”

When Schoenbrun was working on the TV Glow soundtrack they said their producers asked why they were so obsessed with the musical element. “The way I would think about it is the soundtrack, if it works, reminds you of the movie and makes you want to revisit the movie,” they said. “And the movie, if it works, reminds you of the soundtrack and makes you want to revisit the soundtrack. It becomes less like a ‘fun thing that I watched for an hour in the theater’ and more, I think especially in a teen-angst-specific sort of way, a part of you, a place to return to.”

If that’s not a rallying cry for the rebirth of the soundtrack, then I don’t know what is.