More than undergirding one of 2024’s biggest films––speaking for size, scale, length, awards prestige, print weight––Daniel Blumberg’s The Brutalist soundtrack has the distinctly unenviable task of following Scott Walker, Brady Corbet’s only prior collaborator and one of the, say, ten greatest musicians born after World War II. From the first, blackness-ensconced sequence it’s clear the composer-to-composer transition was clean, but even seeing the film front to back couldn’t prepare me for the full suite, which––listening to it some three months later––signals a massive achievement all its own, future Oscar-winner or not as its companion.
If there’s not much constructive I can offer (this is the film stage, after all) I’ll at least note its variance from drone and noise pieces to full-bore jazz riffs, and a final track that neatly portends the surprising leaps Corbet made in his feature. And finally: a Hungarian-accented spoken-word track from Adrien Brody.
Stream below and read our feature on the best scores and soundtracks of 2024 here.