HBO’s new series Westworld is a dystopian mashup of wild west culture and a roboticized future. Its soundtrack provides a fitting sonic reflection, thanks to sprawling yet skeletal orchestral arrangements by German-Iranian composer Ramin Djawadi, who also scores Game of Thrones. Yesterday, WaterTower Music dropped a new EP featuring music from the show’s first season, including covers of Radiohead and The Cure.
“The show has an anachronistic feel to it. It’s a Western theme park, and yet it has robots in it, so why not have modern songs?” Djawadi told Vulture, “and that’s a metaphor in itself, wrapped up in the overall theme of the show.” Indeed, the five-song selection, which includes Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun,” seems to mirror the bleak and reconstructed future that Westworld portrays.
In the show, many of the tracks are played in the saloon as part of the robotic piano player’s repertoire. Billboard reports that licensing anthemic songs like The Rolling Stones’s “Paint It Black” likely cost HBO upward of $55,000 — a small price to pay, considering the show debuted in October to the network’s highest premiere ratings since 2014’s True Detective.
It stars Evan Rachel Wood as Dolores Abernathy, a robot in the process of realizing the artifice of the world built around her. Westworld is the second television adaption of the 1973 film of the same name — the first, 1980’s Beyond Westworld, was canceled after just three episodes. The soundtrack can be streamed in its entirety here.
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Image via HBO