Alien: Earth sounds freaky right away, with its opening title accompanied by the foreboding music of composer Jeff Russo. The idea for this theme, an ominous take on Cream’s 1967 classic “Strange Brew,” came from series creator Noah Hawley, Russo tells The A.V. Club. The two have worked together since 2009’s ABC drama The Unusuals, so he’s used to his pal coming up with inventive ideas. “When he first asked me about using this song, I didn’t think it made much musical sense,” Russo admits. He changed his mind when Hawley sent a recording of him strumming his guitar and singing it. “That’s when I thought I could thread it into the score I had already worked on, add a couple of melodies, fuck around with his voice to make it weird.” Like Hawley, Russo saw how lyrics like “kill what’s inside of you” fit with the show’s themes. The final result landed well enough that Hawley and Russo recorded a version of the track at Abbey Road Studios.
Music and sound are essential to the 2120-set horror drama, in which a spacecraft carrying five different alien specimens crash-lands on the planet and extraterrestrial creatures wreak bloody havoc on humans, synths, hybrids, and everything in between. This week’s outing, “The Fly,” sees two characters perish because of these monsters: Lost Boy Tootles (Kit Young) succumbs to the fly-like being’s poisonous acid, while Arthur (David Rysdahl) becomes victim to the franchise’s good old facehugger. Those respective scenes feature gross sound design—screeching, squishing, and screaming galore—overlapped with Russo’s now-familiar, ambient score. “I approach these big moments by trying to figure out how they make me feel. You can’t be too on the nose, like playing sad music in a sad scene. One of the best ways to let tension build is to let the moment express itself before turning the music on.”Â
Russo’s goal wasn’t just to craft something eerie, though. He wanted to focus heavily on the characters’ journeys, none more so than Sydney Chandler’s Wendy, a synthetic with human consciousness. The high-pitched, dramatic, whimsical piece “Wendy” became “the basis for all of the interconnectivity of this music since Wendy is the linchpin.” In a similar vein, he also spent time figuring out the orchestral and relatively sweet melody of “Sibling,” which plays in episode two when Wendy reunites with her brother, Hermit (Alex Lawther), and convinces him she’s his sister by reminiscing about Christmas. “Noah had told me early on he wanted a theme for them because the connection between Hermit and Wendy is a huge part of the show, and he didn’t want me to hold back on how affecting their theme should be. I wrote that melody sitting at the piano after reading the script, knowing it would play either before, after, or during their hug.”
While he loves coming up with music to fit the character, Russo explains that he tempered an urge to have themes for everyone to avoid turning this into a “Frankenstein score.”Instead, he used music he already composed and twisted it around for major moments, like revisiting the unsettling, erratic six-minute track “Weyland-Yutani”—full of whistling woodwinds—as the background music for the interactions between Morrow (Babou Ceesay) and Slightly (Adarsh Gourav) in this week’s hour. “Morrow is trying to influence Slightly into doing whatever he wants, which is getting someone killed and freeing the Xenomorph, and as an employee of the [evil corporation] Weyland-Yutani, it made sense to use this sound.”
An essential instrument in Russo’s score is the Bassdesmophone, which was built for him by the Switzerland-based company Lunason. “It’s a triangular-shaped, big bowed thing with two strings that I can use a bow on and make these incredibly evocative sounds,” he explains. “That instrument ends up pretty much on the entire soundtrack. It is most notable when you hear groaning or a big whack sound, like an electric explosion. It helps give the score emotional tones, too, and an underlying romantic-sounding tension.”Â
Russo, who began working on these pieces almost five years ago, refers to his relationship with longtime collaborator Hawley as that of a “sounding board.” The two have worked together on Legion and Fargo, with the composer earning an Emmy in 2017 for the latter. And he credits this successful partnership to their backgrounds of playing in their respective bands and sharing similar musical tastes. “The idea of world-building with music is particularly important to Noah and me in all our projects,” he says. “We wanted to tip our hat to the franchise’s former composers like Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner, but our goal was to make the sound and music feel ultimately unique for the show.” Â
