Chernobyl Soundtrack
The soundtrack album, built from recordings made in a nuclear power plant.
Last updated
Chernobyl: Music from the Original TV Series is the soundtrack album of the miniseries. The score was composed by Hildur Guðnadóttir and was built from sound recordings made inside a real nuclear power plant. The album has thirteen tracks and was released on May 31, 2019, with a vinyl edition following on September 6, 2019.
Last updated 2026-09-29 from the source article.
Lore & Background
In August 2018, while the series was being filmed, the composer and the score producer Chris Watson went to the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania to record ambient sounds. The team wore hazmat suits while recording. They captured reactor halls, hallways, turbine saws, the hum of machinery and the door of the engine room.
Every sound in the score comes from those recordings. The composer decided against artificial sounds made with instruments and pre-recorded material, and she also decided against a theme tune, building a separate soundscape for each episode. She said she wanted the power plant, and the radiation, to be a voice in itself. Composition took more than seven months.
Reader's Guide
The score was well received, with praise for its soundscape, its composition and its live recording methods, and it has been named one of the best original scores of the composer. Her work on it brought several awards and nominations, among them Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards.
The album was issued by the labels Deutsche Grammophon and WaterTower Music, and the vinyl edition by Decca Records.
More in Production
Elsewhere in Chernobyl: The HBO Miniseries
Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Chernobyl (soundtrack) (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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