When Daniel Blumberg ascended the stage at the Oscars this year to accept his best original score trophy for “The Brutalist,” the bald, mild-mannered Englishman in the all-black suit read nervously from notes. “I’ve been an artist for 20 years now, since I was a teenager,” he said, perhaps jogging some music fans’ memories: This was the once curly-mopped singer and guitarist from the 2010s indie-rock band Yuck.
His Academy Award put him in good company. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails have won the category twice, while Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood is a two-time nominee. And bubbling up beside Blumberg are a crop of artists from New York’s early 2000s indie boom, when idiosyncratic and ambitious bands made their careers on blog love, critically acclaimed albums, relentless touring schedules and the occasional lucrative sync deal.
Two decades later, entering their midlife years, an increasing number of their members are turning to film scoring as a new creative outlet — one they can pursue from home studios — rather than rely on the millennial nostalgia industry.
David Longstreth, the central figure of Dirty Projectors, created the imaginative and sprawling score for the fantasy journey “The Legend of Ochi,” which A24 released in theaters this year. Paul Banks, Interpol’s frontman, recorded propulsive music for Magnolia Pictures’ deadpan satire “Sister Midnight,” which opened in New York in May and will soon expand nationally. Various permutations of Animal Collective have provided haunting sounds for small-budget projects, including the stripped-down sci-fi tale “Obex,” which Oscilloscope Laboratories will distribute later this year.
“The creative conversations I find really interesting,” said Christopher Bear of Grizzly Bear, who is now a prolific film and TV composer. “You’re not necessarily talking about music references. Often it’s more interesting if you’re not, because then it’s about story and picture and just more aesthetic questions. I find myself doing creative things that I probably wouldn’t if I was just left to my own devices in my studio.”
Longstreth, who has a reputation for swinging wildly across the creative spectrum, said he was interested in scoring “The Legend of Ochi,” directed by Isaiah Saxon, because it allowed him to take on a supporting role. “I feel like I’ve evolved and grown a lot as a band leader, but what would be even cooler is for me to be somebody’s drummer,” he said in a video call from his home in Los Angeles. “It’s a freeing place to be as a writer of music.”
He and Saxon first became friends over a three-hour lunch on an off-day during a Dirty Projectors tour. Saxon eventually shared his idea for “Ochi”: The film would be about a long-raging battle between a rural Carpathian community and a race of mythical beasts. The two teamed on other projects, including the animated short “Earth Crisis,” as Saxon wrote and developed his full-length feature.
Longstreth’s music for “The Legend of Ochi” was years in the making, and involved orchestras in Vienna and North Macedonia, a choir in Los Angeles, the cimbalom specialist Cory Beers and the Romanian master pan flutist Radu Nechifor. The result is stirring, disorienting in some moments and serenely comforting in others.
For Saxon, the collaboration fulfilled his dream “to be in a band with Dave,” he said. “It’s probably frustrating for him to be in a band with someone who doesn’t know how to make music and ultimately has so much power and control over the output, but I think his willingness to go into that was based on our collaborations over the years.”
For Longstreth, scoring became a revelatory adventure. “I came into this not really knowing anything about it and probably underestimating film music, broadly,” Longstreth said. “That’s an interesting place to be coming from — a self-considered outsider place.”
Interpol’s Banks has been a cinephile since before his band formed in the late 1990s. Several friends from his teen years studied film at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, and his roommates at New York University were enrolled in that institution’s famed program. He’d been trying for decades to score a movie before his management introduced him to the English director Karan Kandhari.
Kandhari was an Interpol fan, and “Lights” was one of the songs he spun repeatedly while writing “Sister Midnight.” He sent Banks the script, a darkly comic take on arranged marriages in India that unexpectedly turns supernatural, years before production began. Banks redid the scores to some of Kandhari’s short films to demonstrate what he was capable of. In the end, he created several instrumental pieces for the film and also covered the Stooges’ “Gimme Danger” and the Iggy Pop song that gives the movie its name for the soundtrack.
For Kandhari, collaborating with Banks, a first-time composer, fit into his larger ethos. “There’s a lot of nonactors in the film, and I think there’s something special about that,” Kandhari said. “With most art, you’re trying to reach a state of naïveté to some degree. The older you get, the more conscious you get, but it’s trying to get to a place where you can erase some of that and be unconscious, which is where the magic comes from.”
Banks had previously been told that directors are hesitant to hire recording artists, because of the frustrations that can arise when musicians aren’t willing to adapt or redo their compositions as the film evolves. But he was totally fine with sublimating his ego for the score. “It ain’t a music video for your song,” Banks said from Berlin, where he now lives. “It’s sound to complement a film. And if you love film, you realize how impactful the right sound is on how the visual is received by the viewer.”
The most successful film composers take on multiple projects a year, and develop sometimes highly structured systems to get the jobs done. But a musician accustomed to the somewhat chaotic energy of the music industry may be more open to nontraditional practices.
That proved to be the case when the director Albert Birney asked Animal Collective’s Josh Dibb, known as Deakin, to score his film “Obex.” The two had become friends after Dibb moved back to Baltimore. (Dibb and his bandmate Brian Weitz (a.k.a. Geologist) had also previously done the music for “Crestone,” directed by Birney’s partner, Marnie Ellen Hertzler.) “Obex” is a supremely strange film made with a tiny crew, and Birney wanted a unique approach for the music. He initially proposed to Dibb that they do something similar to Neil Young’s improvised guitar score for Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man.”
Instead they embarked on an intensive three-week session, fueled by peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, where Birney joined Dibb in his studio every day and explained what he wanted as they worked. “There was something fun and spontaneous about just the intuition guiding us and leading us,” Birney said. “And, OK, we’ve got 37 cues that we need to write music for — let’s just start making things and crossing them off.”
It wasn’t the approach that Dibb would have chosen, but he came to see the benefits. “I’m a constant worrying perfectionist, so no project I’ve ever finished feels finished to me,” Dibb said. “This was, in some ways, going against all my instincts, but I think that’s the cool thing about collaboration.”
There’s a long history of innovative recording artists scoring films. Brian Eno, Vangelis and Tangerine Dream were all early practitioners. Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo are arguably now better known for their scores than their transgressive bands. Instrumental post-rock groups like Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai have found their scoring niche, as have more experimental-leaning artists like Mica Levi and Julia Holter. The Baltimore D.I.Y. musician Dan Deacon somehow provided the music for “Venom: The Last Dance” and the band Son Lux just joined the Marvel Universe with the score for “Thunderbolts*.” Reznor and Finch recently announced the first Future Ruins festival in Los Angeles, which will showcase groundbreaking film and TV composers.
Of the 2000s New York indie scene alumni, Bear has done the most to fully embrace the role of score composer. He moved to Los Angeles around the time Grizzly Bear stopped touring and recording, though it never officially split up. (It recently announced a set of live dates set for the fall in New York, Chicago and California.) Bear broke into scoring while his band was still active, when the creators of “High Maintenance” needed some nonlicensed music as their nascent web series grew in popularity, and then he stayed on as it moved to HBO.
He has now scored a batch of indie films, including the acclaimed drama “Past Lives,” which he worked on with his Grizzly Bear bandmate Daniel Rossen. He also did the music for “Adults,” the new Gen Z comedy on FX, plus the upcoming films “Carolina Caroline” and “Roofman.”
Though he never aspired to make his living through scoring, at this point Bear has no desire to pursue a new recording project. “It feels like a wild fluke to be able to make music with any kind of success,” he said. “I’m just like, that was great, and I don’t feel like I’m looking to chase that again.”
Bear doesn’t miss the physical realities of tour life, but longed for some of its communal aspects — and surprisingly scoring has helped fill that gap.
“One of the things I loved about touring is you build this family, your crew,” he said. “You are bonding with strangers, people that you don’t really know, but you’re all putting something together. With a film or a show, you are doing that on a much bigger level. So many different people are involved, just trying to make one creation happen.”
When Longstreth and Saxon first started talking about “The Legend of Ochi,” their references were avant-garde European composers like Olivier Messiaen and György Ligeti, but over time, Longstreth has become inspired by bold, early 20th-century Hollywood scores from figures like Alfred Newman and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, as well as the blockbuster work of John Williams.
“We’ve just had, what, 40 years of increasingly meek music? Music turning into just pure underscore, pure vibe, pure sound design,” Longstreth said. “I’m just ready for a different thing. I want big music. I want melody. I want beautiful, luscious harmony. I want music to be part of the story.”
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