The Indie Bands Behind 2025’s Most Exciting Movie Scores Are Consequence’s Composers of the Year

Consequence's 2025 Annual Report celebrates the best movie music of the 2025 with our Composers of the Year accolade, awarded this year to a foursome of indie rock artists: IDLES, Son Lux, Young Fathers, and The Lumineers' Jeremiah Fraites. Also, check out our lists of the 25 Best Movies of the Year, and stay tuned for more lists and interviews.

“You’re going to be caught. You’re going to be found out,” Jeremiah Fraites kept thinking while writing the score for Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk. “They’ve hired the wrong guy. You don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and it’s going to become apparent very quickly.” He's been making music with The Lumineers since 2005. But experience is no guarantee against imposter syndrome.

Fraites did overcome his insecurities to not only help bring Stephen King's first novel to the screen, but also create the score for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. Like Young Fathers, IDLES, and Son Lux, the other artists being celebrated as Consequence’s Composers of the Year, Fraites found himself in unfamiliar circumstances, and wound up creating some of the year's best film music.

There's a long tradition of musical artists crossing over into film scoring: James Brown doing the music for '70s blaxploitation movies Black Caesar and Slaughter's Big Rip-Off, David Byrne winning an Oscar for the The Last Emperor score, Nancy Wilson of Heart's frequent collaborations with husband/director Cameron Crowe. What made 2025 special was a collection of soundtracks that pushed the boundaries of what cinematic scores can do, while preserving the essential voices of the artists behind them. The process drew some of them out of their comfort zones, but brought avant-garde edge to an eclectic array of movies.

Many of the groups that dove into film scoring this year faced a learning curve. Young Fathers's Graham Hastings says that the concept of writing music to picture wasn't something too foreign to them as a band, because "when we make a song, usually one of the first conversations is like talking about what the video would be."

Still, when director Danny Boyle tapped them for the job of composing the score for 28 Years Later (one of the year's best films), Hastings remembers, "We were making things too busy at first, because we were trying to make a song over the film. Danny would say, 'This just needs to sit like this — and then it needs to explode.' Being forced into those things was really exciting."

Bandmate Kayus Bankole says that the process taught them a lot about how to strip things down, so that "things can take more time to get into." As a result, it felt possible to "create a horror film that has another level to it, where you can connect to a sense of community."

IDLES had an unconventional involvement with the music of the equally unconventional Caught Stealing: Frontman Joe Talbot wrote nine songs for Darren Aronofsky’s crime comedy after reading the script, prior to it going into production. Five of those compositions were ultimately used for the soundtrack.

Talbot didn't have any specific scenes in mind for the songs he wrote, thinking about the project in more abstract terms. "Like the title track that I wrote was 'Rabbit Run,' because I was actually reading Rabbit, Run by John Updike at the time, and I had this idea of the allegory or the metaphor of the character also running away from himself." He also kept Caught Stealing’s punk '90s New York setting in mind, looking to The Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, and other music from that era/location for inspiration.

In addition to those tracks, IDLES performed the rest of the film's score, written by composer Rob Simonsen (The Whale, Deadpool & Wolverine). To ease the process, the band handed Simonsen a "palette of IDLES sounds" to write with: drum loops recorded by drummer Jon Beavis, as well as "the cadence and the riffs and the kind of lines and pads that we would use for a frantic violence song, or a subdued or a sinister underlying timbre," Talbot says. "We gave him a broad spectrum of what we create within our world of albums, as like a beat pack to sample."

Talbot describes the collaboration with Simonsen as a joyful one. "He came in with a sense of fun and excitement and experimentation. We played with that, and we created something together. Not to say that it wasn't his score -- it absolutely is Rob's score. He led us there. We were just able to play within that, and we were really grateful for that because we were green."

Of the bands interviewed for this piece, Son Lux is the only one that's already received an Oscar nomination, thanks to their acclaimed work for 2022's Best Picture-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once. Due to what they learned from that experience, the trio knew they wanted to start working on their score for Thunderbolts* before production on the Marvel Studios movie began. "Because of our success with Everything Everywhere, and Kevin Feige's affection for that film, it was an easy argument for us to make," Son Lux's Ryan Lott says, something that felt important given the "breadth of precedent established" by previous Marvel films.

Working collaboratively for Son Lux means splitting up a lot of the labor. Ian Chang says that when they were working on Thunderbolts*, any tracks that used "the full weight of the orchestra" would typically go to Lott, whereas Chang would "take action scenes more than others, but not always, while Rafiq [Bhatia] takes on a lot of the esoteric or trippy scenes. It's not very cut and dry, which is nice because I don't think any of us like finding ourselves being too pigeonholed into one thing."

Son Lux had spent the pandemic shutdown working on the score for Everything Everywhere, and received a similarly elongated runway thanks to the WGA/SAG strikes in 2023, which gave them extra time to create a suite of themes that Thunderbolts*. Director Jake Schreier played those compositions at the movie's table read, revealing, in Lott's words, "what the movie sounds like." Lott says that at the movie's premiere, he spoke to some of the movie's cast, who told him that getting to hear the music in advance "was a fun dynamic that they were able to benefit from."

Writing music in advance of a movie's production is an atypical order of operations, since a film composer's job traditionally begins after production has wrapped on a movie and the picture has been edited. However, there's a strategic reason for a composer to start early: In that standard version of the process, it's common for picture editors to use segments of pre-existing (often famous) movie scores during the assembly process, with the intention of later replacing those tracks with new music. This can lead to a situation known as "temp love," where a director becomes so enamored by the temporary score that they want the final score to hew closely to the temp one.

One of the most famous examples of this is when Stanley Kubrick was making 2001: A Space Odyssey, and ultimately rejected an original score by Alex North in favor of the soundtrack's now-iconic classical selections.

Fraites, being aware of this phenomenon, also began writing music right after reading the script for The Long Walk, estimating that he sent Lawrence "62 different song ideas" in advance. He was later grateful he'd put in that early work when he watched the rough cut of the movie, which Lawrence and editors Peggy Eghbalian and Mark Yoshikawa had temped with the original music he'd already written. "Thank God I wasn't getting the movie with, like, Max Richter and John Williams [temp scores]," he says. "That honestly would've been my worst nightmare."

Richter and Williams are famously composers who work with large orchestras — and now, thanks to Danny Boyle, so are Young Fathers. Hastings and Bankole laughingly admit that Boyle... pushed them to use a full 60-piece orchestra for the score. "He never really forced us, but he definitely, you know, hinted it big time," Hastings says.

Bankole remembers Boyle saying, "'I want you to have the full experience. I want you to actually see what it's like, and be completely involved with all the bells and whistles that may come from working on a score.'" And Bankole was grateful, because "that was the magical moment there."

"There's nothing really like it," Hasting agrees. "It's one of those things that, if you're lucky enough to experience it even once in your lifetime, you're already extremely lucky. It kinda emboldens you a bit, as soon as you hear it on that scale. To get in that position from where we've come from, it's a rare thing. It puts a jet on your back."

Son Lux collaborated with the London Contemporary Orchestra for Thunderbolts*; Bhatia gives full credit to collaborators like LCO conductor Hugh Tieppo-Brunt for translating their music into "something that's going to be playable through the filter of one of the oldest and most established music traditions." The LCO, he adds, "were just such a dream for us to work with," because "there's a mutual interest and admiration and a desire to embrace at that middle ground."

One thing Fraites hadn't realized about composing music for the screen is how technically complicated the process can be. "I was just shocked at how much paperwork there is, for lack of a better description," he says. "Say you change one thing, like you replace an organ with a different organ. You have to make sure that you remember which file you did that to. Any time you make a big change or a small change, it was essentially equal amounts of work. It just was psychotic at times, keeping track of like, 'Oh, it was actually version 15.' I have insane Excel spreadsheets."

For all of these musicians, working on these scores expanded their abilities as artists as they learned to trust their instincts even in these unusual situations. "There were so many things where we would say, 'Oh, Danny's not going to like this,' but we'd send it anyway," Hastings says. "And he'd love it — and we were this close to not sending it at all, because we just thought it was miles away."

Fraites also got the opportunity to express musical ideas he'd had for years that he knew wouldn't work for The Lumineers because "they had too much information or they felt too cinematic. It has been really fun to extrapolate upon them." To him, there's an oddness to how similar and different composing is from making music as a band. "It feels like night and day, but it also feels like when you really distill it, you're just trying to make music that makes you feel something."

There are a lot of scores, Fraites adds, that are complex works of art. "But I would say a lot of scores that have personally touched me and changed my life are at their core quite simple. With film cues, the best ones out there, a lot happens in a very short amount of time. It gets right to the point in a short amount of time. And I think that's a really hard thing to accomplish."

It's a concept Bhatia of Son Lux agrees with. "There's a thing that cinema does so well that I feel is like increasingly being beaten out of music: Cinema really teaches the payoff of letting certain things be small. Part of what you learn is that there's a ceiling on how big something can be, and you don't really appreciate that unless you juxtapose it against something very small. That's something that [Son Lux] has always been interested in, how opposites cast each other into greater relief."

Working on Caught Stealing, Talbot says, has left him excited about the possibility of working on future soundtracks with Aronofsky. But it also reawakened his own love for the movies; he's been "back to the cinema every week since." He's even considering directing his own movie down the line.

And yes, he'd absolutely do the score for it himself.