The world is slowly dying, but the dead aren’t. Sqürl’s (the musical duo of director Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan) score for Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die provides the perfect foil: meandering, darkened drone against the film’s silly meta-comedy backdrop.
The Dead Don’t Die is a fervently self-aware zombie comedy, whose characters know they’re characters and where death by zombie is more of an inconvenient eventuality than a catalyst for despair. Sqürl push against this tone, balancing the film with a needed touch of seriousness and foreboding.
Droning electric guitar appears throughout, like a jam session in slow motion. It crawls forward before latching onto a riff dripping with fear and repeating, again and again. This continues with great success, leading the charge on a deeply atmospheric score. Sqürl also inject heavy doses of synth, both as rhythmic structure (taking the traditional place of drums and bass in rock) and as the lead in tracks like “This Is All Gonna End Badly” and “Malignant Wave of Doom.” These are the most interesting songs as they represent a singular emptiness and despair. Desolation and hopelessness are at the core of zombie films, and these tracks ensure that ‘The Dead Don’t Die’ stays true to such themes.
The released score alternates between short dialogue tracks sampled from the movie and Sqürl’s tracks. The dialogue tracks are completely on their own, without backing music – a rare choice in film scores. At first, these tracks feel jarring, breaking up the flow of the music because there simply is no music. But this practice actually becomes quite effective, as each music track feels like its own separate chapter prefaced by a brief prologue of horror.
Although not appearing on the released score, Sturgill Simpson’s theme song bears mentioning. It’s a somber country-western ballad at odds with the modern trend of cleanly produced pop country. It also serves both as a repeated in-joke as well as a pseudo character, as vulnerable to the dangers of a zombie apocalypse as any of the film’s human characters.
With The Dead Don’t Die, Sqürl composed a score that is experimental and incredibly effective at both coexisting with and modifying the film.