Alien: Isolation – Soundtrack
Christian Henson, Joe Cahill
Ambient, Avant-Garde, Electronic, Orchestral
The Alien: Isolation soundtrack is a 2014 score from composers Christian Henson and Joe Cahill of Spitfire Audio that does exactly what a good horror score should — it makes you feel like something is wrong before you can articulate why. Drawing heavily from Jerry Goldsmith’s original 1979 Alien score and the analogue synthesiser textures of that era, it’s a record that sounds like it was recorded on equipment that predates the game it accompanies, all oscillating drones and orchestral stabs and the kind of atonal creeping unease that burrows into the back of your skull and stays there. It’s as much a love letter to late seventies science fiction sound design as it is a functional horror score, and it holds up as a listening experience completely divorced from the game — which is the mark of a soundtrack that was treated as a serious piece of work rather than an afterthought.
Recommended
Genghis Tron – “Board Up the House”
Mookie Singerman (vocals), Hamilton Jordan (guitars), Michael Sochynsky (programming/electronics)
Cybergrind, Mathcore, Metal
Board Up the House is a 2008 record from Genghis Tron that arrives sounding like a metal band discovered electronic music and decided the correct response was to detonate both at the same time. The programmed drums hit with a precision that shouldn’t feel organic but somehow does, the guitars are caustic and dissonant, and vocalist Mookie Singerman screams over synth lines that would be at home on a dance floor if that dance floor was also on fire. It’s relentless and weirdly melodic in the same breath, the kind of album that sounds like nothing else in its orbit and lands in that rare category of records that still feel genuinely strange no matter how many times you return to them.
Recommended
Katatonia – “The Great Cold Distance”
Jonas Renkse, Anders Nyström
The Great Cold Distance is a 2006 album from Swedish doom merchants Katatonia that finds the band at peak refinement — the death metal roots are long gone by this point, replaced by a precise and devastating strain of progressive rock that weaponises melody the way other bands weaponise volume. Jonas Renkse’s vocals sit at the centre of it, clean and sorrowful and delivered with the kind of restraint that makes every line land harder than it should, over guitar work from Anders Nyström that manages to be both technical and deeply atmospheric without ever showing off about it. It’s an album about grief and disconnection that doesn’t wallow — it just sits with those feelings very quietly and very patiently until you feel them too.
Recommended
Nine Inch Nails – “The Fragile”
Trent Reznor (vocals, guitars, piano), Charlie Clouser (arrangements and programming), Danny Lohner (guitars)
Industrial Rock, Ambient, Electronic, Noise Rock
The Fragile is a 1999 double album from Trent Reznor that arrives at nearly two hours long and earns every minute of it, a sprawling industrial rock record that swings between annihilation and fragility with the kind of control that only someone who spent years perfecting their craft in a haunted house in New Orleans could pull off. It’s Reznor at his most ambitious and his most exposed — the aggression is still there, the distortion and the rage, but threaded through it is something genuinely vulnerable and orchestral that gives the record a weight his earlier work was too armoured to carry. It was commercially undersold on release, critically reassessed almost immediately after, and sits now as one of the defining records of its era — the kind of album that reveals new rooms every time you walk back into it.
Recommended
Something Is Killing the Children
James Tynion IV, Werther Dell’Edera
Something Is Killing the Children is a Boom Studios horror series from James Tynion IV and Werther Dell’Edera that opens with children being slaughtered in a small Wisconsin town by something nobody can see and escalates from there with remarkable efficiency. Erica Slaughter arrives as a monster hunter who is less interested in explaining herself than in getting the job done. The series is smart enough to let that mystery breathe rather than rushing to answer it, building a mythology around the organisation she works for and the creatures she hunts that reveals itself slowly and earns every reveal. Dell’Edera’s artwork is the secret weapon — angular, shadowy, and deeply unsettling in the way it withholds as much as it shows — and together with Tynion’s writing it delivers one of the strongest horror comics to come out of the last decade.
Recommended
