From the moment the glowing title card of Netflix’s “Stranger Things” drifts across the screen, the undulating synth arpeggios of the opening theme make it clear that the show’s music will play a key role in scene-setting. Created by twins Matt and Ross Duffer, who landed a spec script for their first feature film just months after graduating from Chapman University in 2011, “Stranger Things” has been most commonly referenced as an homage to ’80s classics like E.T. and Poltergeist. Similarly, the soundtrack has drawn comparisons to film composers from that era, including John Carpenter and George Romero co-conspirator John Harrison. But Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein—the soundtrack’s composers, as well as members of the Austin synth band S U R V I V E—weren’t necessarily looking to emulate their soundtrack heroes when writing the score.
“The Carpenter thing is there, but it wasn't something we were thinking about at all,” Dixon tells Pitchfork. “We're using all these instruments that he was using, so it's going to sound kind of similar, but we weren't necessarily looking to what he did.”
Dixon and Stein were tapped by the Duffer Brothers to score “Stranger Things” early on in the show’s progression, after the Duffers initially used the S U R V I V E song “Dirge” to soundtrack their pitch trailer. This long-term collaborative process may be one of the biggest reasons that the show’s soundtrack feels like such an integral part of the production: music and picture were conceived simultaneously. “We had a few scripts, but we were pitching the demos before they had even finished casting,” Dixon says. “They played some of the demos that we had done against the auditions, so I think the music kind of informed who they cast, and vice versa.”
The presence of ’80s analog synths rising and falling in the background of conversation comes off as jarring at first, but after a few episodes, the score starts to carve out its own presence; you can start to anticipate when the music might cut in. An immense amount of thought went into writing these cues and themes, so much so that the “Stranger Things” soundtrack requires two volumes. The first, featuring 36 different original tracks, is out now via Lakeshore Records, which has released a number of standout soundtracks recently (Swiss Army Man, “Mr. Robot”); volume two arrives August 19.
“One thing that we thought early on would be simple is to have very thematic things. ‘Oh, the theme for the show is mysterious, we'll try to add a mysterious part when something is brooding.’ And we'd realize, that doesn't work here,” Stein says. “Or we'd be like, ‘Oh, here's this romance scene for the kids; well, here's a romance cue… oh, that's not really what we want.’ We ended up writing very specifically tailored stuff for each scene instead of just revisiting all the same motifs.”
The two went on to contrast their soundtrack to that of a show like “Twin Peaks,” where patterns from Angelo Badalamenti’s now-iconic “Laura Palmer’s Theme” were used as the musical backdrop for everything from romance to discovering a dead body. “It’s crazy how they got that theme to work over multiple parts,” Stein says. “Trying to force our music to work like that would have been difficult, so we just kind of evolved our workflow.”