She and her team are then tasked with making Levinson’s vision a reality, making their own suggestions, seeking clearance from the music’s many rights holders and filling in gaps where necessary. “The library of music that he has in his brain is endless,” Malone added. “If it works, it works,” she said in an interview, describing the show’s creative ethos and noting that Levinson writes to music, frequently including his song choices in the script. Jen Malone, the show’s music supervisor, has also overseen the songs of “Atlanta” and “Yellowjackets,” where a strict sense of place and period guide the choices. The show, in a sense, would be a musical.”Ī collage of flashbacks, daydreams, nightmares and rhythmic music video-esque sequences, “Euphoria” uses the interplay between its eclectic soundtrack and Labrinth’s recurring score to create a “wild fantasia that blends a raw naturalism with hyper-reality,” Perez said. “We were interested in plenty of music - too much music for some.
“We were not interested in playing by those rules,” said Julio Perez IV, the show’s lead editor, who recalled conceiving of their “own sonic galaxy” with the “Euphoria” creator, writer and director Sam Levinson. Tasteful spareness has never been the objective.
In addition to O’Connor and Keem, Sunday’s episode featured a meta-montage of pop culture allusions set to Townes Van Zandt’s “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” plus the premiere of a new song by Lana Del Rey and an onscreen, neo-gospel performance by the singer and producer Labrinth, who also handles the show’s score.
Often cramming a couple of dozen tracks into a single hour - from the underground to the instantly recognizable, the 1950s to the 2020s - the show doesn’t do emphatic needle-drops so much as a TikTokian shuffle of aural and visual stimuli, bouncing between genres, eras and moods.
But on “Euphoria,” the maximalist hallucination of high school currently in its second season on HBO, it was but one stretch of carefully curated songs and references that, like the series itself, aimed for emotional resonance over superficial accuracy. Back at the birthday party, a wasted girl in a bathing suit melts down, belting along simultaneously to the same track, one released long before she was born.įor some television shows, this would be an episode’s worth of big music moments.
He settles for a nostalgic slow dance to “Drink Before the War” by Sinead O’Connor, a devastating power ballad from 1987. Not long after, a troubled father skims a gay bar jukebox, looking for INXS’s “Kick” but finding Nicki Minaj’s “The Pinkprint” instead. “Trademark USA” by Baby Keem, a rising rapper of the moment, blasts from the car speakers. “I love this song!” the mom squeals, with an added profanity.Īt the same time, three teenagers in a beat-up ride are on their way to shoplift some alcohol. A modern high schooler’s birthday party, chaperoned by an inebriated mother with no household rules except discretion, gets going to the sound of Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” that indelible 1990s relic.