Stranger Things soundtrack creators on blowing up, inspirations and season 2

With their band S U R V I V E, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein have been happily making starry-eyed, ominous electronic music for half a decade. Nothing’s changed in that sense. New album RR7349, out 30 September, continues down that line. The major difference, however, is how much the duo’s lives have transformed in the past twelve months.

With a lifetime’s supply of synthesisers, Kyle and Michael helped shape pivotal moments and gripping scenes throughout Netflix’s wildly celebrated sci-fi series Stranger Things. They’re also partly the reason why the show’s opening credits have become a memeworthy hit of their own.

The Austin musicians still don’t quite know how they were discovered by the show’s creators, the Duffer brothers. But after receiving a cursory email last July, they went on to acquire a full-time role for the show. And following season one’s widespread success, that job has since become even more all-consuming.

They’ve spent the past month hurriedly putting together both volumes for an official Stranger Things soundtrack. Across close to a hundred songs, these tracks pendulum swing from sweet, sweeping synths to crashing, atonal noise. Often it’s like waking up from a nice dream into a strobe-filled, nightmarish nightclub in the space of thirty seconds.

Both Kyle and Michael are currently working towards the next S U R V I V E tour, their first opportunity to see just how much online love has translated into real-life fandom. “We have no idea what to expect. As speaking to people directly, we haven’t had a chance to do that yet.”

You didn’t just provide the soundtrack from a distant role. With the Duffer Brothers, they involved you in so many other aspects too. You were there for casting, there to see how it all came together. What was that like?

Michael: Sitting in on casting – that was a weird thing to watch. Seeing these weirdly unique kids, just watching them do their lines. I’ve never seen a casting call or audition before. I was like, ‘Yeah, these kids are legit!’ It was weird, just to get little bits of footage like that.

The soundtrack has such a broad range of emotions. There’s so much to factor in. How much of a challenge was that to produce?

Kyle: In film and TV, a lot of things end up being a lot shorter than traditional songs. It can be easy. But at the same time, you have to pack more into a lesser amount of time. Or it can be much more minimal than something released on an album. You’re just conveying whatever the mood is. It was a fairly easy thing to come into. In that, when you sit down to write a S U R V I V E song, you can do anything you want. More or less. We do have an aesthetic that’s dark, sad, epic. But you get a scene of a kid riding a bike down the street and laughing, you’re not gonna make a dark, evil chord come in. A picture helps you – it guides you, and you only need to make a couple of decisions. There’s generally only two or three appropriate ways to handle a scene.

Michael: Most of the time it was really smooth, everyone was enjoying what we were doing. But there was maybe a couple of times where we were trying to get one cue to somewhere everyone was happy with it. And that was probably with some of the more generic, cinematic moments.

Were you told to construct music that was specifically jumpy and terrifying?

Michael: We did have to do that. They’re called ‘Stings’. We didn’t have to do a whole lot, but there are these really intense crescendos of chaos.

Kyle: And there’s also the sound effects team who do stuff like that.

Michael: We made the most melodic, sensitive music you could make, and then we made some of the most atonal, fucked-up, dissonant stuff. Which is great. We put all of that into S U R V I V E anyway, in really nuanced ways. There’s this weird dissonance, blended with really melodic lines. But now it’s deconstructed.

Did any other compositions or scores make for good inspiration?

Kyle: We definitely became more aware of other scores. It was our job, so we had to do some research. But we weren’t necessarily looking for stylistic approaches, more techniques, or ways to go about scoring a scene to help achieve the right effect. How minimal can it be? Can it just be percussive to make it seem like time is passing? We wouldn’t listen to a soundtrack and make something that sounded like it.

Michael: We already knew what we wanted to achieve musically, because we have our boundaries that we choose to stay within. But on a day-to-day, when I’d be watching TV with my girlfriend, I’d pay closer attention. Almost like a spotting session, I’d notice when music came in. And I would also notice how bad a lot of TV music is.

Kyle: I think we did a pretty good service to TV watchers everywhere by making a theme song that’s not fucking terrible. There’s so many shows that I love, and I have to skip the opening credits, because the songs drive me up the wall.

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With it being a Netflix series, all the episodes came out at the same time. How quickly did you gauge a reaction, with that in mind? Was it overnight or is it still snowballing?

Kyle: Both of those things. It was very immediate. I was camping the day the show came out, so I didn’t even have cell phone service – I was gone for the weekend. I came back home on Sunday, turned my phone back on and it was just chaos. I mean, really flattering chaos. But chaos nonetheless. I can’t turn off my phone now. Just keeping up with everything is taking up a good amount of time. Luckily we’ve got a team helping now but it’s very time-consuming, just to keep up with what’s going on. There’s a lot going on!

There’s the exciting prospect of a second season, too.

Kyle: I would love to get an email today that says, ‘Here’s your contract for Season Two’. But that hasn’t happened yet.

I don’t think they’re going to suddenly ask Major Lazer to do it. You should be alright.

Kyle: We had a great relationship with the Duffers. And they were kind of in the same boat as us. There’s two of them, I would consider them our peers. And this is their first major thing – just like us. We’re navigating the same issues, just on different ends. The conversations between us are funny. We definitely consider them friends at this point. I just get random text messages that are like, ‘WHAT. THE. FUCK. IS. HAPPENING.’ Just some screengrab of an article and it’s like, ‘Woah, that happened too?’

Where were you when you first saw the opening credits?

Kyle: I still haven’t seen the actual show on Netflix. I’ve seen the opening credits, though! We had to do so many revisions of that. Don’t get me wrong, it looks beautiful, but we’ve seen it plenty of times.

Michael: They finished the sequencing of the titles before they approved the music.

Kyle: There were so many final versions, though. ‘Final, v2, ready, final final final.’ And then they revert back to an older one. I’ve seen the show, but I haven’t see the production version that’s on Netflix. I will watch it. Probably before the year is over. I don’t have eight extra hours.

Michael: I went and stayed with my girlfriend’s family in San Diego, and I watched it in a family setting, which was great. I got to see other people’s reactions. If I was alone watching it on Netflix, that would be weird. I’d be scrutinising everything, not even paying attention to the story. But being with a group of people seeing when they get scared – that’s great.