Brian Eno to release soundtrack score to ‘Top Boy’

Netflix has announced that Brian Eno‘s soundtrack for the series Top Boy will be released in various formats next month.

• READ MORE: ‘Top Boy’ season four review: high-quality crime drama with a humanist core

‘Top Boy (Score From the Original Series)’ will be released on vinyl, CD, and digital formats, coinciding with the final season of the series. This marks the first time that any of Eno’s music from the series, aside from two tracks included on Eno’s album, ‘Film Music 1976 – 2020’, will be available to the public.

The first track to be released from the soundtrack is ‘Cutting Room 1’ which was a completely unheard track. The song is one of two on the LP that Eno selected for inclusion though they do not appear in the series. Both tracks were written for Top Boy, hence their ‘Cutting Room’ titles.

“From the beginning of Top Boy, I was given the freedom to work in the way I prefer,” said Eno in a press release. “Making music and atmospheres and then giving it to the film makers to use as they saw fit. I try to absorb the idea of what a piece is about and from that I produce a lot of music, and say, ‘Here it is. Use it as you wish.”

He continued: “If you’d been scoring it in the conventional Hollywood way, the temptation would be to up the excitement factor, up the danger factor, all the time. But Top Boy is really about children in a pretty bad situation. So I explored the internal world of the children, not just what’s happening to them in the external world. Quite a lot of the music was deliberately naive, it was sort of simple. The melodies were simple, not really sophisticated, or grown-up.”

‘Top Boy (Score From the Original Series)’ is set for release on September 1 digitally and September 29 on CD and Vinyl. Visit here to pre-order the LP. Check out the full tracklisting below.

‘Top Boy (Score From the Original Series)’ tracklist is:

1. ‘Top Boy Theme’
2. ‘But Not This Way’
3. ‘Damp Bones’
4. ‘Cutting Room I’
5. ‘Floating On Sleep’s Shore’
6. ‘Beauty and Danger’
7. ‘Beneath The Sea’
8. ‘Afraid Of Things’
9. ‘Waiting in Darkness’
10. ‘The Fountain King’
11. ‘Washed Away In Morocco’
12. ‘Overground’
13. ‘Watching The Watcher’
14. ‘Sweet Dark Section’
15. ‘Sky Blue Alert’
16. ‘Delirious Circle’
17. ‘Cutting Room II’
18. ‘Dangerous Landscape’
19. ‘The Good Fight’

In other news, Eno is set to embark on a European tour for this autumn, marking his first solo tour in his five-decade career.

Built around his 2016 album, ‘The Ship’, the live shows will feature both new and old compositions from his catalog. The Baltic Sea Philharmonic with conductor Kristjan Järvi, actor Peter Serafinowicz, and Eno’s longtime collaborators Leo Abrahams and Peter Chilvers will all back the musician on the tour.

The shows will take place in October with stops in Venice, Berlin, Paris, Utrecht and London. Visit here for tickets.