For Fans of Ramin Djawadi

In an era of drone-and-swell trailer music, Djawadi keeps betting on melodic identity. The Game of Thrones theme is hummed by people who have never watched the show. The Westworld piano arrangements of Radiohead and Soundgarden are stranger and more affecting than most original scores. That is not an accident. Djawadi builds a motif first and then finds out how far it can travel, which is why his scores hold up on repeated listening long after the images are gone.

Guillermo del Toro's kaiju film needed a score that could make 250-foot robots and monsters feel emotionally credible, and Djawadi delivered one of the most propulsive action scores of the 2010s. The main theme is built from a simple ascending riff that the film uses sparingly, which means that when it arrives in full, it earns every decibel. The score is worth hearing separately from the film.

By threading player-piano versions of Radiohead, Soundgarden, and The Rolling Stones through the Westworld score, Djawadi did something genuinely unsettling: the familiar became alien, and the alien became sad. The technique sounds gimmicky described on paper and is devastating in practice. It is also the rare score that works as a standalone listening experience even for viewers who have never seen the show.

Djawadi's Game of Thrones Live Concert Experience toured arenas worldwide and was, by most accounts, a genuine event. Few composers have scores that hold up to arena performance without a film running alongside them. The fact that his do says something about how formally complete the music is on its own terms.