A24 doesn't just pick composers, it seems to find people who treat film music as a place to break their own instrument open and see what falls out. What we keep coming back to across these four scores is craft: unusual instrumentation, techniques pushed past their comfort zone, and a refusal to reach for the obvious. Here's why each one earns its place.
Hereditary - Colin Stetson
What makes this score so unnerving is that almost nothing in it is what it sounds like. Stetson is a multireedist and a master of extended technique, and for Hereditary he deliberately threw out the horror rulebook. Instead he built everything from woodwind, percussive key striking and breath work, then manipulated them until they were unrecognisable. Unique textures such as clarinet doubled with vocals at times emulate the role of stringed instruments; contrabass and bass clarinet de-tuned become deep, creaking, woody drones. The "percussion" is the clatter of the instrument keys themselves - add Stetson's circular breathing, which allows for a continuous tone and maintains tension. Visceral and genuinely ominous, exactly as Ari Aster wanted (quoted as saying he wanted the score to "feel evil"). That commitment to conjuring dread from real, physical, acoustic effort and reimagining the scope of woodwind instruments is why we love it.
Minari - Emile Mosseri
If Hereditary is about dread, Minari is about warmth, and Mosseri gets there through beautiful simplicity. The foundation is his piano, but the sound is subtly his own: he detuned a 1940s guitar as low as it could go while still holding pitch and doubled it against the piano, so the two marry into a third, grounded, earthy tone that's neither one nor the other. Over that sit his own hushed, wordless falsetto vocals and a 40-piece string section, plus a wobbly 1980s synth tucked underneath that keeps everything from feeling too settled - a quiet instability under all the warmth. We love how emotive and moving it is without ever tipping into schmaltz. It has the soft-focus quality of a childhood memory, which is the whole point: he wrote most of it from the script alone, before a frame was shot, so the film was edited around the music rather than the reverse.
Under the Skin - Mica Levi
Levi's first-ever film score, and still one of the boldest. Working mostly from a single viola, she wrote music meant to mirror the inner world of an alien experiencing a human body for the first time, so of course it had to sound otherworldly and unique. The strings are detuned and microtonal, swarming and buzzing, then pitch-shifted and slowed until they stop feeling like music and start feeling like a bodily process. The recurring glissandi - a glide between two notes, passing through all intermediate pitches smoothly - becomes a leitmotif of dread. It sits in a lineage with Ligeti and Penderecki, but Levi's version is entirely her own: brooding, hypnotic, sensual and deeply unsettling all at once. And then, crucially, the score softens; the track "Love" resolves into an aching, simple chord as the character finds her humanity. That arc from predatory to tender is what makes it more than an exercise in atmosphere.
Marcel the Shell With Shoes On - Disasterpeace
A total change of register, and proof of how wide this sensibility can stretch. Rich Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace, of It Follows fame) faced an unusual brief here: the director wanted the music "more emotionally ambiguous and less prescriptive," refusing to tell the audience exactly how to feel. Vreeland's answer was a score "organic without using organic sources," heavily inspired by 1980s Japanese ambient music (Hiroshi Yoshimura's work sits alongside it in the film), built from warm, loose synth textures that were stripped back again and again until only the right amount of feeling remained. A whistling motif, made from synthetic train-whistle sounds, threads through the film as a quiet symbol of change. The result is playful, quirky and dreamy, light on its feet but shot through with a real undertow of melancholy and longing. We love that restraint: the discipline to make something this charming without ever over-egging it.
Four wildly different sonic worlds, one shared instinct: treat the score as a lead character, source your sounds from somewhere unexpected, and trust the audience to feel it. That, for us, is the A24 difference.