Cool Stuff: Let The No One Will Save You Vinyl Soundtrack Invade Your Ears
Last week, "No One Will Save You" brought a thrilling alien invasion to Hulu, courtesy of director/writer Brian Duffield. In the film, Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever, in an astounding performance) lives in a small town that she feels like an outcast in. It's the reasoning behind that which provides an emotional mystery that slowly unfolds while an alien invasion begins throwing her entire world into upheaval. Crafted with almost no dialogue, Dever's performance does a lot of the heavy-lifting, expressing so much emotion without saying anything. But we'd be remiss if we didn't mention another key element of the film's tension and suspense: the haunting score by composer Joseph Trapanese.
Though you always hear about how great Daft Punk's score for "TRON: Legacy" was, the famed duo also worked with Joseph Trapanese on that composition (and yes, he actually knows what they look like under the helmets). He's also given us scores for "The Raid" and "The Greatest Showman," which is some serious range. In "No One Will Save You," Trapanese says he had a bit of a dream project, because, as he explained in a Hollywood Records featurette, the lack of words in the film provided "a huge platform to say things that normally the dialogue would say." But that also provided an even greater challenge because much more focus would be on the music and sound design.
Thankfully, Trapanese delivered music that is suspenseful, frequently unsettling, and the film is perfectly punctuated by his orchestral arrangements. Now you can bring that score home with the Waxwork Records release of the "No One Will Save You" vinyl soundtrack, featuring no less than 30 tracks.
Beam me up
Speaking with Hollywood Records about the soundtrack, Trapanese said:
"The music of 'No One Will Save You,' I would describe as surprisingly organic. We wanted the score to feel still a little foreign, so one of the techniques I would use was pre-record. Normally you have the orchestra at the end of the film. This time, I recorded little fragments of ideas and heavily tweaked, so it was still organic, but it was either detuned or reversed. It didn't sound like your traditional orchestra, but it still sounded organic."
But you might be wondering how Trapanese created the most haunting sound on the score. It's clearly created by strings, but it sounds a little bit warped. It's rather prominent at the beginning of the movie. The composer explained:
"One of my favorite cues in the film is really just the opening. I took string glissandos going down but reversed them, so they evolve over time and get thicker, and they become like this cloud of sound. You also hear these trombones and french horns. That juxtaposition between that string cloud, that brass cloud, kind of like if you were sitting in a piano, we're banging on the top of the keyboard and the bottom of the keyboard. The combined effect of that is that feeling of dread, that feeling of horror."
The vinyl soundtrack for "No One Will Save You" comes in a special "Invasion" vinyl variant, swirled with "Midnight Blue and White Light Beam" coloring. It's housed in a heavyweight gatefold jacket with matte satin coating, and it comes with a 12x12 insert. The only downside is that it doesn't include the song "Knock On Any Door" by Ruby Murray, which would have been a nice touch. You can pre-order it now for $28 at Waxwork Records, and it's expected to ship sometime in January 2024.
"No One Will Save You" is streaming on Hulu now.