Best film and TV soundtracks of 2025
It’s been another extraordinary year for film and television. As directors, showrunners and world-builders raise the bar on screen, composers continue to meet that ambition with scores full of imagination, emotional depth and meticulous craft.
Across genres from gothic reinventions and sweeping sci-fi epics, to intimate post-apocalyptic storytelling, 2025 has given us soundtracks that reach far beyond accompaniment. These scores shape worlds, heighten stakes and bring audiences closer to the emotional heart of each story.
Here are our standout soundtracks of the year.
28 Years Later
Young Fathers
More than two decades after the last instalment, 28 Years Later arrives under Danny Boyle’s kinetic direction, and Scottish trio Young Fathers bring their unmistakable identity to the score. Known for fusing experimental electronics, raw percussion, gospel-tinged vocal layers and jagged bursts of energy, the band reshape the film’s world with music that feels both ominous and strangely hopeful. Synths, strings and warped textures build a propulsive momentum — a sense of movement through darkness rather than stasis, while their vocal treatments add a human edge beneath the unrest. Instead of echoing the franchise’s past, Young Fathers imprint it with their own forward-driving, genre-defying spirit, giving Boyle’s return a sound that is unsettling, urgent and defiantly alive.
Frankenstein
Alexandre Desplat
Alexandre’s score for Netflix’s Frankenstein mirrors the film’s gothic intimacy and moral unease with remarkable restraint. In dialogue with Guillermo del Toro’s blend of the macabre and the compassionate, Desplat threads fragile melodies through darker undercurrents, giving shape to the story’s pull between creation and consequence. The result is a quietly devastating score — elegant, unsettling and impossible to shake.
Black Mirror Season 7, Hotel Reverie
Ariel Marx
Netflix’s seventh season of Black Mirror took us back into mind-bending territory once again, and Ariel Marx’s score for Hotel Reverie guides that journey through the lens of 1940s cinema. Her use of intimate strings, wistful melodic lines and textures that gently blur comfort with unease supports John Crowley’s classic-film framing while subtly exposing the fractures beneath it. The result is an understated, beautifully shaped score that deepens one of the season’s most atmospheric stories, carrying its quiet tension and romance right through to the final reveal.
The Last of Us, Season 2
Gustavo Santaolalla & David Flemming
Gustavo and David's music remain the emotional core ofThe Last of Us,and in Season 2, they sharpen the fragile, textural minimalism that has long defined the series. Gustavo's signature ronroco — intimate, unadorned and deeply human, sits at the centre of the score, allowing the smallest gestures to carry remarkable weight. It’s a sound world inseparable from the story’s emotional register, and one we had the rare opportunity to explore firsthand through our Ronroco library in 2025.
Predator: Badlands
Sarah Schachner & Benjamin Wallfisch
Dan Trachtenberg reunited with Sarah Schachner and Benjamin Wallfisch for Predator: Badlands, with the pair crafting a score designed to give this ninth instalment its own musical identity. Recorded with the Sydney Scoring Orchestra, the soundtrack moves between percussion-driven electronic writing and full orchestral force, creating a tense, muscular backdrop shaped around the film’s depiction of Yautja culture. From its chant-led motifs and pounding rhythms to its bold departure from the franchise’s familiar musical language — marking it as one of the series’ most distinctive and invigorating scores to date.
Bugonia
Jerskin Fendrix
In Bugonia, Jerskin Fendrix delivers a haunting, disquieting score that mirrors the film’s psychological terrain. Though the writing often leans toward sparse, dissonant gestures — piano fragments, distant drones, brittle percussive pulses, the music gains its unnerving density from the way it was captured. Fendrix conducted the 90-piece London Contemporary Orchestra, recorded together in a single room at AIR Studios, deliberately avoiding stems to prevent any one instrument from taking prominence. The score is a striking example of how boldly cinematic music can evolve when freed from conventional methods.
Wicked: For Good
John Powell & Stephen Schwartz
With Wicked: For Good, John Powell and Stephen Schwartz bring the story to its emotional and thematic resolution under Jon M. Chu’s cinematic direction. Building on the musical language established in the first film, the score allows familiar themes to evolve with greater weight and consequence, shaped by richly detailed orchestral arrangements that deepen both scale and intimacy. Powell’s writing moves fluidly around Schwartz’s songs — expanding harmonic colour, pacing and texture without competing for attention — an approach he described in an interview with us earlier this year: “It’s very much about the story… you have to understand the space in which the music needs to work.”.
One Battle After Another
Jonny Greenwood
Jonny Greenwood continues to reinvent what film scoring can be with One Battle After Another. Built around a persistent pedal tone — a single note that repeats as shifting harmonies move around it — the score becomes a musical analogue to the film’s central idea: progression is a struggle handed down through generations, one battle giving way to the next. Greenwood surrounds this structure with orchestral dread, dissonance and raw, visceral textures. In a year filled with lush, expansive scores, his work cuts differently — ragged, unyielding and haunting.
Hamnet
Max Richter
With Hamnet, Max Richter offers one of the most poetic and emotionally resonant soundtracks of the year. Drawing on sparse piano, delicate strings and subtle choral washes, Richter builds a tapestry that evokes grief, memory and fragile beauty. The music doesn’t demand attention, yet it lingers — soft, yet weighty with sorrow and longing. It’s the kind of score that doesn’t just accompany a story, but amplifies its emotional core; a gentle but unforgettable companion to the film’s themes of loss and love.
Avatar, Fire and Ash
Simon Franglen
Returning to James Cameron’s world of Avatar — a universe defined by scale, detail and emotional sweep, Simon Franglen delivers a score for Fire and Ash that feels fully attuned to the film’s expanding mythology. In developing the score, Franglen even invented new instruments to capture the chaos introduced in this chapter — reflecting the project’s extreme technical and creative ambition. The Dream, one of the soundtrack’s key moments, features vocals from Miley Cyrus, her voice bringing a striking warmth and intimacy to the film’s vast musical landscape. As Franglen noted in an interview with us earlier this year, “I think this score is going to surprise people… it’s by far the most complex project I’ve ever worked on” — an ambition reflected in music that anchors Cameron’s vision with clarity, momentum and emotional weight.