Watchmen HBO Series Soundtrack - Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (2019)
The extension of Watchmen as an HBO mini taking place decades later in the same universe was some great TV and you’ll find it on a lot people’s lists of the best television of the last decade or so.
Even when Reznor was a full-on rock star and Nine Inch Nails was regularly (well, “regularly” by Reznor’s standards) dropping new albums of industrial / dance / metalcore madness, there were still intersticial releases of menacing dark ambient creepshow music called Ghosts as well as the skin-crawling soundtrack for the original Quake game.
Reznor eventually started working with Ross as much more than just a hired hand on NIN, but as a full collaborator. The two worked on movie soundtrack music, which ended up being a nice combination of both ends of the band’s spectrum: The doom-laden claustrophobia and the beat-heavy brutality.
If these two sides of Reznor’s and Ross’ musical personality weren’t already integrated, they certainly got that way on his lengthy set of music for Watchmen.
It’s almost more of what you might call incidental music than a soundtrack. It plays in the background in most scenes but each track is often very specific to that one spot without doing a bunch of connective tissue or leitmotif or whatever.
Kudos to whomever came up with some good wordplay in the track titles that either remind you of what section of the show it accompanies or is a decent joke in itself. Squid Pro Quo, Dark Knut Returns, and Müller Time are particularly great titles.
