Read This: The musical evolution of James Bond's iconic gun barrel intro

When it comes James Bond, it’s never been so much a choice of “style over substance” as it has been “style is the substance” for the franchise, a motif that has only very recently deviated (ever so slightly) during Daniel Craig’s tenure in the role. Speaking of which, No Time to Die—Bond’s 25th outing, as well as Craig’s final outing in the role—is set to premiere tonight in London, capping off a very long, much delayed road to theaters. To celebrate, we encourage you to look back at both the style and the substance of one of the series’ most iconic images: the gun barrel intro sequence.

Although published a couple years back on RogerEbert.com (when many of us innocently assumed No Time to Die’s release was just around the corner), Charlie Brigden’s retrospective analysis is making the internet rounds once again for obvious reasons. The detailed examination of the big and small artistic licenses (to kill) taken by composers over the decades shows, among many other bits of trivia, how Bond not so much set the trends of the time as mirrored them, alternating between “classic cool” and “attempted edginess commensurate with the times”