Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Unveil Score for Luca Guadagnino's QUEER

Milan Records has released QUEER (ORIGINAL SCORE) featuring music by two-time Academy Award® winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for director Luca Guadagnino’s new film.

Reuniting with Guadagnino following their GRAMMY®-nominated collaboration on Challengers, Reznor and Ross deliver a lushly evocative score that builds alongside the evolving onscreen drama, which is based on the unfinished novel by William S. Burroughs and explores the romance between two American expats in Mexico City. Inspired by Burroughs’ cut-up literary technique, the composers utilized sampled instrumentation to create a recurring palette of gauzy, ethereal solo piano and woodwind orchestrations that continue to intensify into a final fevered pitch of electronic synths and Motorik-tinged textures. 

One of the film’s key musical moments and a thematic throughline for the score is main love theme “Pure Love,” a dreamlike composition of piano and strings that echoes the tender romanticism between the two main characters. The intimately moving number appears in various reincarnations throughout the film, with Reznor and Ross resampling and processing the original cue with tonal and textural shifts that add new layers of meaning to the deepening relationship onscreen. The film culminates with “Vaster Than Empires,” an original end credits song written by Reznor and Ross with vocals by Brazilian icon Caetano Veloso. Featuring lyrics lifted directly from Burroughs’ memoirs, the track is a fitting endcap to both the film and score itself, its aching poignancy building layer-by-layer throughout each new verse.

ABOUT QUEER 

1950. William Lee, an American expat in Mexico City, spends his days almost entirely alone, except for a few contacts with other members of the small American community. His encounter with Eugene Allerton, an expat former soldier, new to the city, shows him, for the first time, that it might be finally possible to establish an intimate connection with somebody.

Photo credit: John Crawford