Listening to HBO’s prestige television scores can reveal hidden depths of these shows’ commentary—or spawn dance floor hits and viral excitement

WORDS BY AMELIA NONEMACHER
EDITED BY IMAN SULTAN

I love Succession, and I especially love its score. It perfectly encapsulates the grandeur, delusion, and dysfunction of the Roy family as they battle over the future of their international media empire. The combination of sweeping orchestrals with hip-hop-inspired 808 percussion in the main title theme is intoxicating. Even after five years of watching the show, I never skip the title sequence so that I can luxuriate in all of its glory for one minute and thirty seconds, as God and Nicholas Britell intended. It even inspired me to sit down at the piano for the first time since I was twelve to learn a simplified version. I still get asked to play it any time my friends and family see a piano in the vicinity.

One friend listens to it whenever she’s in midtown Manhattan, the stomping grounds of Kendall Roy. Another uses it to infuse their nine-to-five with the same urgency of Succession’s high-powered executives and incompetent siblings. My dad sends me articles, interviews, and Vanity Fair chats with Britell breaking down the significance and musical technique behind the main theme. Even after the show’s end, I still hear it everywhere—in months- or years-old viral videos dredged up by the algorithm and record-breaking figure skating performances. Like the show itself, the score is both what cultural critic Terry Nguyen calls “mass niche” and a beautifully executed piece of art.

It’s not like exceptional scores go unrecognized in our culture and media environment; there’s an entire category for them at the Oscars (Best Original Score), the Emmys (Outstanding Music Composition for a Series and Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music), and the Grammys (Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media). Composers like Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Ramin Djawadi, and Britell occasionally become household names for their scoring work, and established musicians like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails occasionally earn admiration for crossing over into the field. Reznor’s electrifying score for the film Challengers earned widespread acclaim from critics and audiences in the absence of major awards season recognition. A good portion of the social media chatter over Reznor’s scoring work remains driven by the belated realization that a member of Nine Inch Nails had the range to score blockbuster films like Challengers, The Social Network, Gone Girl, and Soul. Other scores have accrued a level of mass recognition and critical acclaim such that they become synonymous with their source material and enter into the pop cultural canon, such as John Williams’ Star Wars theme. 

In the last few years, HBO has maintained a solid streak of breakout scores. Beyond Succession, The White Lotus’ season one and two scores captivated audiences with haunting vocals and layered instrumentals corresponding to each season’s exotic location; season two’s operatic Italian score exploded on social media and even became a remixed hit in nightclubs and raves. Industry has built into a sleeper hit over three seasons, buoyed by its shimmering score by DJ and composer, Nathan Micay, that has become something of an anthem for the show’s finance-employed fans. It helps that Micay’s past work as a dance music DJ lends the score a resemblance to the viral YouTube “beats to study to” playlists of the 2010s with an additional layer of narrative relevance and emotional depth.

“I get a lot of messages from people in finance and crypto and all that kind of stuff, and they’re always telling me, ‘oh, I do so much work to your score,’” Micay told Back Matter. “And I sometimes ask myself, like, do they do that just because this score was prescribed to them through a show that’s about finance, or is it genuinely a score that actually incites that electricity I was going for? There’s a lot of intention behind the music, but it’s been funny how it’s actually crossed over into real life.”

Within their respective shows, these scores amplify emotional arcs and help inform how the viewer experiences plot points. Industry uses its sparkling synths and club-inspired tracks to introduce the audience to the sympathetic characters within the often opaque world of banking. The White Lotus’ scores for each season suggest an air of mystery and building tension, setting up the murder mystery plot and underlying class anxiety of creator Mike White’s social critique. Succession’s main theme introduces viewers to an opulent world underneath which simmers family dysfunction. “When things sound, quote-unquote, ‘right’ for the Roy family, it’s wrong,” Britell told PBS in 2023. “It doesn’t work because the family is so dysfunctional that the music has to have this kind of brokenness to it somehow.” 

Like the show’s writers, Britell’s score alternates between critiquing the Roy family’s position at the top of social, political, and economic hierarchies and humanizing them. The show’s score and soundtrack particularly enjoy mocking Kendall—the hollowest of hip-hop fans—who raps the Beastie Boys in a squeaky pitch in the pilot and performs cringey, earnest musical numbers at an unusually high rate for a prestige television protagonist. The score also amplifies Kendall’s worst moments, drowning out the surrounding club beats of his birthday party with soft piano as he opens his father’s birthday card to find an offer to “cash out and fuck off,” or thumping like a heartbeat as he dashes through New York City on foot, listening to the first of many coups against his father die over speakerphone. 

In Industry, the score closes the gap between the audience and the characters. Industry’s rendition of finance and banking is that of a market that is all at once foundational to the global economy, boring and tedious to understand, and founded on meaningless movements of capital and fluctuating confidence. Showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay—former bankers themselves—skip over the awkward chore of explaining the jargon of the trading floor. Instead, they rely on characters’ emotional stakes and glittery montages of debaucherous nights out to keep the audience invested. 

For Micay, those nights out aren’t so different from days on the trading floor or client lunches. “We want the audience to feel as interested in banking as the characters do,” he says. “We want to convey that this trading floor, this gray, sterile space with bright lighting, is like the best nightclub you’ve ever been to for these grads.” 

As the stakes ramped up each season, the score’s initially optimistic, bubbling notes gradually darkened as the characters became more jaded in reaction to the never-ending—and perhaps fruitless—toil of transcending social status, familial trauma, and cycles of power and abuse. “I want it to have this glamorous feeling, but also worn out, torn out. These people are exhausted, and at some point they’re all gonna have to look back on their careers and be like, was it worth it? These are not people who have made it—or at least in their minds, they haven’t. Nothing’s ever enough,” Micay says.

The score reinforces the show’s depiction of the predatory nature of the free market. For the audience, the experience of watching a line tick up and down might not sound like much of a thrill, but through Micay’s soaring electronic score, the viewer gets to share the excitement of landing a deal or making a trade. They’re invited to join in the dance, and it’s only when they’re truly deep into the music that they realize how complicated and corrupt that dance actually is.

The White Lotus has similarly generated a hit from its score with its season two main theme, “Renaissance.” As the anthology took a new cast of characters to Italy, the new theme signalled a second era of the show that centered murder, class disparity, wealth, luxury and family. Both iterations of the theme used eerie vocals which composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer calls “oululus,” with a mounting sense of tension manufactured by relentless percussion and instrumentals that progressively layer and intensify until they hit an abrupt breaking point at the conclusion of the title sequence.

In the first season, the score used animal noises, rhythmic drums, and ominous flutes to create a foreboding, natural texture that Tapia de Veer called “Hawaiian Hitchcock,” matching the island setting and the colonial backdrop of the White Lotus Hotel. The updated theme came with a brighter, more seductive theme to capture the pivot from colonization and wealth to sexual politics and wealth. It retained that creeping, haunting feel created by the “oululus” and percussion while slowly growing into a more exciting, salacious, and danceable sound. And people did dance—“Renaissance” has been a feature at music festivals, clubs, and parties since season two first released. Maybe the score feels strange and enigmatic on the show, but when it’s playing in a club, it just sounds like a dance floor hit.

“Renaissance” transformed the theme song into an event, setting a precedent of virality that proved difficult to uphold in the show’s third season. As a whole, the score mimicked the first season’s approach and returned to sounds of the natural environment to augment interpersonal tensions. But after the release of the first episode, fans complained online about the difference between the third season’s main title theme “Enlightenment” and that of the first two seasons. The new theme starts with clapping percussion and an accordion that sounds more like the sample from Kesha’s “Joyride” than a prestige television theme. The theme builds into a steady melody with electronic-ish, woodwind instrument-ish vocals and a vibrato like the oululus turned down to 5 percent power before the song dissolves into ambient synth—no dubstep beat drop, no oululus.

Fans were outraged. Behind the scenes, Tapia de Veer and White had fought over the show’s theme and score since season one, and Tapia de Veer had decided to leave the show a few months before the new season premiered. He told the New York Times in an exclusive interview that he wanted the show to feature a longer version of the theme that developed into the first two seasons’ recognizable sound and had suggested releasing the alternate version after the online backlash. A producer agreed, White refused, and Tapia de Veer uploaded it anyway to his own YouTube, reigniting the online frenzy. Tapia de Veer suggested that producers initially wanted “nice background music” while he continually pushed for “weird music” that had become the show’s signature. As such, “Enlightenment” turned out to embody the show’s polarized critical reception and falling momentum after the first two seasons.

When listening to these scores entirely devoid of narrative context, anyone might be able to pick out the themes to which the music points: the slow addition of drums and darkening sound in Industry, the dissonant opulence contrasted with upbeat hip-hop sound in Succession, and the simmering, insidious tension in The White Lotus. But when these scores are released on Spotify, Apple Music, or the available sound lists on Instagram and TikTok, users will be consuming them on their own merits as a piece of music (or alternatively, content), rather than as accompaniments to onscreen storytelling. This decontextualized engagement echoes Micay’s finance bro fans, viral Succession videos, and White Lotus raves. In this environment, it makes sense that the creative process of The White Lotus’ changing title themes became a point of frustration for fans—not because it doesn’t appropriately represent the season’s trajectory, but because it wasn’t the standalone hit they had come to expect.

As scores take on a life of their own, what happens to the stories behind the music? Their full significance is inevitably sacrificed when they’re turned into clips, trending items, or soundbites. In some cases, this content encourages fans to engage with the source material at a greater depth or bring in new fans who find their curiosity piqued by the music. And yet, in other cases, virality flattens both the production of and the conversation around the show.

Micay’s finance bro followers trading stocks to a soundtrack with the self-professed aim of dissecting how the finance industry reproduces and enforces class hierarchies is the kind of absurd contradiction that might as well be pulled from a Succession, Industry, or The White Lotus script. In a way, it speaks to the success of Micay’s dance-floor thesis. But it also demonstrates the life cycle of prestige television. These scores find widespread appreciation as consumable “content” as their shows gain popularity but at the cost of becoming isolated from their original context. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—the Succession score will always be a banger—but it shows that even a soundtrack can get repackaged for virality in the mass niche media landscape.

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Amelia Nonemacher is a journalist and critic who works between New York City and Austin, Texas. She writes about politics, technology, film, television, and whatever else she feels like.