EDITORIAL

INTERVIEW

Composer Conversations: Jeff Russo on his score for Alien: Earth

In this episode of Composer Conversations, we sit down with Jeff Russo to talk about his score for Alien: Earth, the first time the iconic franchise has made the leap to television.

Russo's path to becoming one of television's most trusted composers began driving cross-country from New York to Los Angeles in pursuit of a career in rock music. From cover bands and record deals to Emmy wins and Grammy nominations, his route into scoring was circuitous, and all the better for it. The harmonic language he absorbed through Pink Floyd, Beethoven and Stravinsky has surfaced in work as varied as Fargo, Snowfall, Ripley and Star Trek: Picard. Each project serves the same essential instinct: to play what a character is feeling, never simply what they're doing.

Composer Conversations | Jeff Russo

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Stepping into a series built on two of the most admired scores in film is a tall order, and Russo doesn't pretend otherwise. With showrunner Noah Hawley, he kept both films in his ear — the slow dread of the first, the military drive of the second — while writing something that owed them nothing directly. No quoted themes, no callbacks; he wanted their weight without borrowing their material.

"This was the very first time this property was being put on television, and I did not want it to sound like television at all. I wanted it to sound like the movies."

The score’s signature sound centres around a custom bassdesmophone, built by Lunason Audio in Switzerland, both its tonal and atonal articulations woven throughout the score to signal the presence of the xenomorph. Russo also brought his long-standing practice of embedding found sounds into the fabric of the music: a method that first crystallised for him on Fargo, when the sound of a broken washing machine became the heart of a pivotal moment in the score. For Alien: Earth, that instinct remained active throughout.

The orchestra was recorded in Abbey Road Studio One — a deliberate statement of intent.

Alien: Earth | Official Trailer

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“That is a familiar sound to me. I had heard it before. I've heard it on so many scores that I love from as far back as the '80s. And that to me, I was overwhelmed with a sense of... I was in a place that felt familiar to me."

Russo describes hearing the first playback and recognising the room's sound immediately. A familiarity absorbed over decades of listening to records made there, and a feeling of homecoming that anchored the score's ambition. He wanted to meet the legacy of the Alien films on their own terms, not diminish it by the constraints of a smaller canvas.

Discover the full story in episode one of Composer Conversations.

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