The music score to Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars anthology series Andor is a difficult beast. The series itself, a gripping political thriller and perhaps the best that Star Wars had to offer for years, isn’t exactly easy to follow. But Nicholas Britell’s music demands your full attention too to keep you from bouncing off it. Once you’ve come to terms with the fact that you’re in a completely different musical universe to John Williams’ film scores, Andor will provide you with some new and fresh aspects that you have never heard under the Star Wars banner before.
On first listen, this score may overwhelm with an overly large collection of tracks, most of which are only a minute or two long, and a great bulk of them perform the same feat time and again: Starting off slowly, building to a crescendo before ebbing away afterwards. These tracks almost seem more like ideas or motifs rather than a fully composed score. In between, however, you will find the occasional musical highlights that are sprinkled all over the score, with some of them lingering on long after you’ve stopped listening.
A great example is “Niamos“, a remarkably catchy piece that sets the musical boundaries right away at the first episode’s cold opening. This diegetic track reappears in different iterations throughout the series and was conceived by Britell as an in-universe piece of music that enjoyed critical success beyond the various planetary boundaries. An “intergalactic hit”, as he calls it, provided there is such a thing as music charts within the Star Wars universe. But who to tell us otherwise?
Another unique feature of Andor is its opening credits. When the title card fades in, each episode we hear a different variation of the main theme, emphasizing each episode’s different soundscape. This includes everything from traditional orchestra to total synthesizers to an elegiac variation intoned by an amateur brass band. Goosebumps material for those who know the series. Yes, the score may be closer to the sound design genre, but that’s not to say it’s devoid of any musical material. There is beauty in it! But for every lyrical or even heroic theme Britell weaves in, there’s an unorthodox counterweight, whether it’s the industrial sounds for the Beskar steel anvil-playing “Time Grappler” or the rebellious, anti-authoritarian citizens of Ferrix intoning a slow, plaintive lament at a funeral ceremony.
As a standalone listening experience, Andor might not be for you, but within the confines of the series’ narrative, Britell’s music works beautifully, adding a strong foundation to a gritty and tragic story that sheds a whole new light on Rogue One and especially A New Hope.
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