Between planning for VFX, jump scares and Xenomorphs, composer Jeff Russo had his otherworldly soundscape work cut out for him. To effectively communicate emotions to the audience, Russo had to create the perfect beats per measure.
“The tempo of any scene can be dictated by what the tempo of the music is doing,” the composer tells Deadline on the latest episode of The Process. “I get to sort of dictate how [the environment] changes, and how the feeling of a scene changes from one moment to the next.”
That philosophy became a guiding principle for Russo as he crafted the score for Noah Hawley’s ambitious expansion of the Alien universe. The collaboration actually began years before production, when Hawley first approached his longtime creative partner about adapting the iconic sci-fi franchise for television.
“I’ve known Noah for almost 18 years now,” Russo says. “One day he called me up and he said, ‘I’m thinking about doing Fargo. What do you think?’ With Alien: Earth, it was the same kind of thing. He calls me up and he says, ‘I’m thinking of doing an adaptation of Alien for television. What do you think that sounds like?’”
Hawley sent Russo an early script in 2021, prompting the composer to begin writing themes long before the series took shape on screen. “I wrote the very first theme I was going to use back then,” Russo explains. “So, it’s been a sort of a long gestational process.” Rather than treating music as a finishing touch, Russo develops large thematic pieces early and continually reshapes them as episodes evolve.
Yet some of the score’s most difficult work came not from the horror, but from the humanity. In Episode 2, Russo created a theme for two siblings attempting to reconnect after one character’s consciousness has been transferred into a synthetic body. The challenge was finding a musical language that communicated love without veering into romance. “It had to be just truly emotional between two people who love one another like family,” he says. “That’s a particularly complicated type of music to write with emotion but without romance.”
That emotionality sits alongside the franchise’s larger musical DNA. Russo and Hawley frequently discussed how to channel the feelings created by the landmark scores of Jerry Goldsmith [Alien] and James Horner [Aliens] while building something distinctly their own.
“How do we take the feelings that you get from the music in the first movie, which is one of the greatest horror movies of all time, and the second movie, which is one of the greatest action movies of all time?” Russo said. “How do we take those feelings and sort of blend them together?”
The answer ultimately required a 70- to 75-piece orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, where Russo conducted the score himself.
“Hearing the score come to life in that way is a feeling that you can’t really find in any other way,” Russo says. “Music played by human hands-on wooden instruments and brass instruments makes a score come alive in a way that I’m not sure any other way can do.”
And for those wondering about the sound accompanying the series’ most terrifying creature, Russo had a simpler answer: an Aztec death whistle. “It’s very evocative of fear and death,” Russo says with a laugh.
To learn more about building the soundscape of Alien: Earth, watch the video above.
