Brian Eno to release ‘Top Boy’ soundtrack next month
Brian Eno is set to release his soundtrack of music for Netflix’s Top Boy next month.
The ambient pioneer has made a host of music for the long-running series, though this will be the first time any has been available to buy or stream by the public.
The album, ‘Top Boy (Score From the Original Series)’ will be released on vinyl, CD and digitally on September 29 and September 1 respectively, arriving to mark the release of the show’s fifth and final season.
“From the beginning of Top Boy, I was given the freedom to work in the way I prefer,” Eno said of his work on the show. “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.
“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,” he added. “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.”
Listen to the first track from the soundtrack, ‘Cutting Room I’, below.
Top Boy aired for two seasons on Channel 4 between 2011 and 2013 before being rebooted by the streaming giant Netflix in 2019.
“For those that have followed the journey from the start, you will know how much this show means to everyone on our team and we wholeheartedly know how much it means to you,” lead actors and executive producers Ashley Walters and Kane Robinson (aka Kano) said in a statement upon the announcement of the final season.
“These characters have been a part of our lives for over a decade now and without everyone’s support we couldn’t have come this far.
“While the journeys of Dushane and Sully have remained at the core of the show, the new characters that have entered the world of ‘Top Boy’ have become a key part of the show’s legacy, representing each new storyline in a raw, authentic way.
“With all this being said, and staying true to our original goal, every story must have an ending and so season three will be our finale. A chance to come full circle and end the journey in the right way.”