Assassination Nation (soundtrack)

Did You Know?

• Leslie Felperin of The Hollywood Reporter noted that the film's music continually impresses as a technical exercise.
• Amy Nicholson of Variety wrote that the score swells with tragic violins and the film rampages on.
• Matt Donato of Flickering Myth called the score electro-punk-pop that beats to the pulse of societal anarchy.

Development

Hultquist received the script during the fall of 2016 and found it highly relevant. He spent roughly a year working on the score. Instead of the standard method of composing to picture, Hultquist collaborated with Levinson and production staff through various unconventional approaches. Having trained to write music to picture, Hultquist found the process of not doing so much more difficult, but Levinson encouraged him to persist, which allowed for experimentation. Levinson gave Hultquist a completely blank slate and full creative freedom. At one point the entire film was scored in the style of Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western work, but because the film spans multiple genres, Hultquist wanted the score to do the same. He noted that the film uses many songs to drive the narrative, while his score grounds the audience in reality; he liked how the song and score play off each other, mirroring how the internet toys with the characters. Hultquist experimented by slowing down and degrading audio, combining trap beats with strings, mangled synths, and a pop song dissolving into ambient mush. Editors sometimes took a cue he wrote, placed it into Pro Tools, and stretched it using the lowest-quality setting, producing a gritty, crushed, unsettling sound that Hultquist called a free-fall into audio weirdness. Many final cues were pieces of music slowed down from the original cue, which had been torn apart. He described the score as fluid and changing at regular intervals.