Stream Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’ Breathlessly Tense Soundtrack For David Fincher’s The Killer

Today, I woke up at about 4AM, and rather than trying to get more sleep like a sane person, I immediately put on The Killer, the new David Fincher film that just arrived on Netflix. I bet Michael Fassbender’s character would approve. (The Killer has been out in theaters for a couple of weeks, but I didn’t make it out.) If you’ve seen The Killer, you already know that it’s fucking awesome. The movie represents Fincher’s take on the silent, existential criminal operative — the kind of soulful but unspeaking wraith that you might remember from Le Samouraï or The Driver or Ghost Dog or Drive. But this killer works in the same disinfected gig-economy hellscape as the rest of us, which makes his story less cool and more bleakly funny.

David Fincher has already talked about his decision to full The Killer with songs from the Smiths. There’s a pretty great Portishead “Glory Box” needledrop, too. And as you might expect, there is a score, from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, that ratchets up the tension in tremendous ways. Nine Inch Nails Reznor and Ross famously broke into the film world by scoring Fincher’s The Social Network in 2010. They won their first of two Oscars for that one, and they’ve scored every Fincher movie since then. At this point, Reznor and Ross are among the best film-score composers out. Most recently, they did great work on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

Reznor and Ross have shown great versatility in their film work, but The Killer is total comfort-zone material for them. If you give these guys a scene that slowly builds teeth-grinding tension, they will build you a masterpiece. Their Killer score is all hums and pulses and drones, with occasional shrieks of discordance. Their works makes it sound like some invisible machine is operating under the world’s surface, pushing people against each other violently. That fits the film’s whole message and aesthetic beautifully. Stream the score below.

The score for The Killer is out now on the Null Corporation.