The 10 Best Film Soundtracks of the Last Five Years
2024-11-01 · 5 min read
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross reshaped what film scoring could sound like, and their work on Challengers might be their peak. The pulsating electronic score turns a tennis movie into something that feels like a nightclub thriller. Every rally sounds like the climax of a heist film. It is absurd and perfect and unlike anything else released in 2024.
Ludwig Goransson's score for Oppenheimer was the sonic equivalent of a panic attack. The strings build and build with relentless urgency until the Trinity test sequence, where sound itself seems to collapse. Goransson won his second Oscar for it, and frankly he could have won two more. The score works as a standalone album in a way most film music does not.
Jonny Greenwood kept Radiohead's experimental spirit alive through his film work, and his scores for The Power of the Dog and Spencer are masterclasses in tension. The dissonant strings on Spencer make Diana's Christmas at Sandringham feel like a horror movie, which is arguably the point. Greenwood makes orchestras sound dangerous.
Daniel Lopatin, working as Oneohtrix Point Never, delivered one of the decade's most unsettling scores for Uncut Gems. The Safdie Brothers' anxiety-inducing thriller got a synthesizer-heavy score that sounded like a broken slot machine having a nervous breakdown. It should not have worked at all, and it worked completely.
Mica Levi's score for The Zone of Interest used absence as its primary instrument. Long stretches of near-silence punctuated by horrifying ambient sound design created an atmosphere of dread that made the Holocaust feel not historical but immediate. It was one of the most disturbing listening experiences committed to film in the last decade.
Other essential entries include Hildur Gudnadottir's Oscar-winning work on Joker, Michael Abels' scores for Jordan Peele's films, and Alexandre Desplat's intricate compositions for Wes Anderson. The film scoring landscape has never been more diverse or more willing to experiment. The old model of sweeping orchestral wallpaper is fading fast.
