Dear listeners,
As I was putting together my annual list of my favorite albums of the year, I realized how much time I spent in 2025 listening to film scores. This isn’t a novel experience for me; as an incurable movie buff, I have my own personal pantheon of favorite film composers — Nino Rota, Bernard Herrmann, Michel Legrand, Wendy Carlos and Giorgio Moroder, if you’d force me to name just a few — and often put on their records when I want the mundane moments of my life to feel more cinematic. I find that I clean my living room with much more vigor and urgency if the “Midnight Express” score is playing in the background.
Earlier this year, I got a chance to geek out about film scores with two people who also spend a lot of time listening to them, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Reznor and Ross live double lives as members of the industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails and acclaimed movie composers who have worked repeatedly with David Fincher (“The Social Network”) and Luca Guadagnino (“Challengers”). My favorite of the three feature-length scores they released this year, for the sci-fi action flick “Tron: Ares,” allowed them to unite those sides of themselves: It’s the first score for which they are billed not as Reznor and Ross, but as Nine Inch Nails. And given that its bone-shaking, retrofuturistic aesthetic is influenced by two of my aforementioned favorite film composers, Carlos and Moroder, I’ve had it in heavy rotation since it came out.
Since I wanted to keep my main albums of the year list focused on pop music, I thought I’d use today’s Amplifier to spotlight some of my favorite film scores of the year. Nine Inch Nails’ “Tron: Ares” made the cut, as did a few others by artists who straddle that line between composer and rock star, like the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and the National’s multi-instrumentalist Bryce Dessner.
Sometimes my love of a film score is directly connected to my love of that film. For example, I was totally spellbound when I recently watched Clint Bentley’s Denis Johnson adaptation “Train Dreams,” and listening to Dessner’s score feels like a way to crawl back inside the movie’s enveloping atmosphere.
That doesn’t always have to be the case, though. Even though I’m generally a fan of Benny Safdie, I was disappointed by his Mark Kerr biopic “The Smashing Machine,” which I found to be disjointed and oddly insubstantial. But I’ve been returning over and over again to its bewitching score, composed by the jazz musician Nala Sinephro, so much so that it’s by far my most-listened-to score of the year. I’d recommend it even more than I would the movie.
Consider today’s playlist a brief sampling of five larger works that I’d encourage you to check out in their entirety. And given that the films containing two of my most anticipated scores of the year — “Marty Supreme” and “The Testament of Ann Lee” — haven’t been released yet, consider it subject to change.
I’m no Nino Rota, I don’t know the score,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. Jerskin Fendrix: “Bees”
When Jerskin Fendrix began working on his score for “Bugonia,” his third collaboration with the Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos, he hadn’t yet seen a script or even a synopsis. Lanthimos gave the composer just three words of guidance: “bees,” “basement” and “spaceship.” From this prompt, Fendrix created an epic and wonderfully unsettling score, performed with requisite grandeur by the 90-piece London Contemporary Orchestra. Given that “Bugonia” concerns a protagonist who believes he is trying to save humanity from aliens, “The score is basically there in the background,” according to Fendrix, “saying, the stakes are high.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Nala Sinephro: “Dawn”
“The Smashing Machine” is the first film score by the 29-year-old experimental jazz luminary Nala Sinephro — perhaps an unlikely choice to write the music for a movie about the macho realm of U.F.C. fighting. But Sinephro’s new-age-influenced compositions give the film a contemplative, dreamlike quality that suggests an inner world that the protagonist, Mark Kerr, can’t always express. This theme for Kerr’s girlfriend, Dawn, played in the film by Emily Blunt, is one of the score’s loveliest moments, full of opalescent synths and diaphanous ribbons of brass.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Jonny Greenwood: “One Battle After Another”
Over the past two decades, the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood has enjoyed a prolific and influential second career as a film composer, working with filmmakers including Jane Campion, Lynne Ramsay and Pablo Larraín. Greenwood has developed a close working relationship with Paul Thomas Anderson, for whom he has scored six films, including the 2025 Oscar contender “One Battle After Another.” I love the way Greenwood’s score incorporates the melody made by the tracking devices that some of the characters use in the movie — a flourish that can be heard on this titular piece.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Bryce Dessner: “The Gadabout, Pt II”
Though indie-rock fans know him best as a member of the National, Bryce Dessner has also built an impressive body of work as a contemporary classical composer who has had his pieces performed by the likes of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Kronos Quartet. He brings both sides of his artistry to his pastoral score for Clint Bentley’s lyrical character study “Train Dreams,” which conjures the American West with understated, folk-inspired compositions cut through with moments of Aaron Copland-like splendor.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Nine Inch Nails: “New Directive”
As Ross told me, of composing such a blazing and intense work for a major movie studio, “Because it was Nine Inch Nails, I think there was an open-mindedness to take some risks.” I can’t say I ever expected to hear a Nine Inch Nails album overseen by Disney, but isn’t life full of wonderful surprises?
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“My 5 Favorite Film Scores of the Year” track list Track 1: Jerskin Fendrix, “Bees” Track 2: Nala Sinephro, “Dawn” Track 3: Jonny Greenwood, “One Battle After Another” Track 4: Bryce Dessner, “The Gadabout, Pt II” Track 5: Nine Inch Nails, “New Directive”
Bonus Tracks
Regular Amplifier readers know I love a good needle drop. A few of my favorites of the year — Marlene Dietrich’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”; the Cleaners from Venus’s “Corridor of Dreams”; Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough” — also come from the films on today’s list, but since I don’t want to spoil them for you, I won’t tell you which. If you know, you know!
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Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the subscriber-only music newsletter The Amplifier.
The post My 5 Favorite Film Scores of 2025 appeared first on New York Times.
