2025 felt like the year electronic musicians slipped out of clubs, studios, and underground circuits and started writing soundtracks to how we actually felt, right in the guts of films, shows, games and anime that demanded more than conventional orchestration. There seems to be a throughline running beneath the top picks this year, with EDM producers and experimental artists plucked from relative obscurity, dragging their practice into scoring rooms. Sometimes they were subtle, sometimes they were bold, but more often than not they wound up being the first thing we all remembered stepping out of a screening, finishing a long binge-watch or shutting off the console.
Even on the smaller end of the year’s slate, you could hear those instincts swell: Tom Rowlands of The Chemical Brothers composed a propulsive techno-inflected soundtrack for Joe Wright’s biographical, Son of the Century, about Mussolini’s rise, using modern electronic language to accentuate the historical drama’s pace and energy. Meanwhile, Scottish trio Young Fathers composed an intense, genre-defying score for Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, combining primal energy, eerie synth work and vocal textures to match the film’s apocalyptic pulse. And ambient music legend Max Richter’s score for Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet uses period-informed sonorities and choir alongside sparse instrumental writing to reflect the film’s emotional heart of family, loss and love.
What ties all these disparate pieces together is a shared sense that electronic sensibilities and rigorous pulse-driven composition were no longer outliers to the scoring process, but central to how the year’s most memorable audio worlds were crafted. What follows are the scores from 2025 that most clearly made good on that intuition.
10) Lia Ouyang Rusli for ‘Happyend’ / ‘Sorry, Baby’
Brooklyn-based experimental musician Lia Ouyang Rusli’s recent scores shifted between clean, melodic writing and abrasions in the texture. Happyend is Neo Sora’s near-future dystopian coming-of-age set in a surveilled Japanese high school and DJ culture, while Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby is an A24 black comedy-drama about a traumatised professor that went from Sundance prize-winner to word-of-mouth favourite on best-of-2025 lists.
What makes these scores distinctive is how Rusli writes, performs, produces and even masters much of the material herself, so its timbre, space and harmony all work in tandem as a single mesmersing instrument. Ambient beds and dance-music pulses form the same palette and stay coherent because the sound design and mixing are handled as compositional tools. Happyend features shimmering synths, close-mic’d piano, staccato strings and club-leaning low end, giving the film a continuous sense of motion. In Sorry, Baby, the focus is narrowed down to small ensembles, intimate piano and voice, and restrained electronics, all kept low in the mix so shifts in register carry the emotional weight.
Our top tracks: “LOVE (Variation 1 and 2), “Being Gay and in Love”, “The Year with The Baby”
9) Satoru Kosaki, Kevin Penkin and Alisa Okehazama for ‘The Apothecary Diaries’ Season 2
For the stunning sophomore season of The Apothecary Diaries,composers Satoru Kosaki, Kevin Penkin and Alisa Okehazama wrote a long-form, clearly mapped score expanded to a 62-track full release. The historical mystery anime about a kidnapped apothecary solving medical and political puzzles inside an imperial court modelled on Tang-era China, was one of 2025’s most visible anime.
The music blends orchestral writing with period-inflected textures and modern scoring approaches. Kosaki’s contributions reflect his long experience in anime scoring with clear melodic lines and layered instrumentation; Penkin brings ambient-leaning orchestration informed by his past work in Made in Abyss and game music; and Okehazama’s sections often emphasise nuanced chamber colours and pacing.
What makes the score so technically impressive is the effortlessness with which it balances three different compositional voices within a unified sonic world, tailored to the anime’s fictional imperial setting, without disrupting narrative flow. Three very recognisable voices are segmented by cue in the tracklists yet still read as a single palatial soundscape.
Our top tracks: “Ka Zuigetsu”, “Orpiment Clothing”, “The Bloodline’s Destiny”
8) M83 for ‘Resurrection’
The score for Resurrection is built around ethereal dialogues between synth pads, processed guitars, and strings, recorded and mixed to feel widescreen but slightly hazed. Bi Gan’s sweeping five-part sci-fi epic about a future where most humans can’t dream has been a favourite at festivals and on cinephile lists, and Anthony Gonzalez’s French electronic rock group has composed the “dreamcore” album of the year to accompany it.
The themes are harmonically simple but stretched through long crescendos and delays that suspend us in time. Gorgeous shoegaze electronica is folded into the orchestral space transitioning between eras, modes and tones. Gonzalez uses a limited palette of ambient synthscapes to mirror the film’s chapter-by-chapter shifts in sensory and temporal logic, so the music always feels bespoke to each formal mode.
Our top tracks: “Spinning Fury (Part 1)”, “Sullen Passages”, “Fantasmers (Silent Film Part 2)”
7) Nine Inch Nails for ‘Tron: Ares’
Oscar-winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross approach Tron: Ares as a systems-music problem of arpeggiated synths, modular pulses and distorted bass arranged in evolving patterns that are thinned or thickened according to the scene. The sound design of filtered noise sweeps, processed percussion, and carefully tuned industrial reverb create a digital space that is as important as any melodic idea.
The film is the third Tron movie and sequel to the Daft Punk-scored 2010 cult classic Tron: Legacy, following the titular AI program crossing into the real world. Its reception was in the odd space between box-office disappointment and cult enthusiasm, with franchise and NIN fans dissecting the soundtrack more than anyone engaging with the film itself. The score is explicitly presented as a Nine Inch Nails project, carrying their full industrial vocabulary into a Disney sci-fi sequel without flattening it into generic blockbuster sound. Their history with ambient and rock albums shows up in pivots between atmosphere and beat-driven writing that more than makes up for this sequel’s failures.
Our top tracks: “As Alive As You Need Me To Be”, “I Know You Can Feel It”, “Inflitrator”
6) Lorien Testard for ‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’
French composer Lorien Testard’s award-winning claim-to-fame for the French turn-based RPG Game of the Year-winner, is huge. With 154 cues composed over five years, spanning over eight hours of music, the album features an assorted family of motifs, orchestrations and harmonic colours assigned to locations, factions and emotional states. Neo-romantic orchestral writing features heavily alongside jazz, surf-rock, EDM and accordion-driven chamber pieces, but the through-line is in the voicing and pacing of clear melodic tops, carefully voiced inner lines and groovy rhythm sections.
Testard layers multiple sampled and recorded pianos into one composite sound, so the keyboard writing stays recognisable even as style and harmony change. But the score owes its instant catchiness to the sheer variety of musical styles organised into a three-act, album-like structure, giving game-music nerds a big, narrative-driven soundtrack to rally around.
Our top tracks: “Alicia”, “Lumière”, “Monoco”
5) Jonny Greenwood for ‘One Battle After Another’
English musician and Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood’s fifth collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson is rhythmically and harmonically restless. The paranoiac, Pynchon-based political thriller about a former revolutionary searching for his daughter in a polarised America, has become the critics’ big 2025 consensus pick, with the score discussed as part of its “infrastructure of allegiance” mood on many an end-of-year list.
What distinguishes this score is how it compresses Greenwood’s earlier PTA vocabularies of stringed unease and odd-meter pulses into one never-ending argument. Piano ostinatos in irregular groupings underpin string sections, and relentless tension is generated from harmonic friction and volume. Greenwood’s riveting orchestrations also rely on strings with audible bow noise, drum patterns with lots of space, and sparing woodwinds. The album credits show him playing piano, guitar, bass, percussion and ondes Martenot with the London Contemporary Orchestra, which lets him control articulation and attack at the source with remarkable style.
Our top tracks: “Baby Charlene”, “River of Hills”, “Trust Device”
4) Kensuke Ushio for ‘Dandadan’ Season 2 / ‘Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc’ / ‘Orb: On the Movements of the Earth’
Japanese composer and electronic musician Kensuke Ushio brings his techno background into orchestral and band-style writing. Across three projects this year, his scores relied on repeating rhythmic cells, side-chained or filtered synths, and small acoustic ensembles that are heavily processed. The works themselves cover a chaotic teen occult comedy, a sadistic dark-fantasy feature about heartbreak, and a historical science-mystery about forbidden heretical ideas; and this year otakus have unanimously heaped praises on his evolving sound as part of why these adaptations felt larger than life.
Across the three, Ushio’s music has been an indelible part of how the stories have lived on in popular memory. The melancholia under the eerie quiet of the pool in, as well as the tremendous action cues elevating its fight scenes in Reze Arc, have all made it to weeb playlists. Absurdity, hormones, fear and affection, all collide in a melange of different genres in Dandadan, so the music carries humour and adrenaline without losing sincerity. And with Orb, Ushio moves toward contemplation and expansion, letting curiosity, faith, doubt and a staggering sense of wonder live in the sound. He scores how people feel while living through impossible situations, and that’s why these works have had such an intense staying power.
(The albums for Dandadan Season 2 and Orb: On the Movements of the Earth still await release on music streaming platforms)
Our top tracks: “Typhoon Devil”, “Thaumazein”, “Overwhelming”
3) Brandon Roberts and Nicholas Britell for ‘Andor’ Season 2
The final, beautiful season of Andor was the series that genuinely took hold of audiences this year with a kind of collective alertness, and the show’s evolving musical identity that shaped how the season was felt, argued over, and remembered, has been a huge part of its miracle.
For the second season, Brandon Roberts extends Nicholas Britell’s established language of unsteady brass, fractured march rhythms, industrial percussion and oscillating synths, into a broader palette. Its technical strengths lie in development rather than replacement, with themes tied to rebellion, occupation and espionage reharmonised, rehythmicised and re-orchestrated, so the musical world stays continuous while the stakes rise.
These evolved motifs culminate around the doom of the Ghorman Arc where the score thickens into a soundscape of dread and distortion tied to the visuals of imperial violence, amplifying the horror without melodrama. The season also brought back “Niamos!” — first introduced under Britell — here remixed into a diegetic club-style track for a space wedding, which fans and critics alike seized on as a rare in-universe hit, and adding it to playlists and memes.
Our top tracks: “Brasso”, “Let It Run Wild”, “Andor (Main Title Theme) – Episode 9”, “Past/Present/Future”
2) Ludwig Göransson for ‘Sinners’
Ryan Coogler’s 1930s Southern vampire horror about returning Black veterans opening a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta, quickly became the year’s big “original blockbuster,” with audiences latching onto the music as much as the imagery. Fresh off an Oscar streak with Coogler and another for Oppenheimer, Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson was clearly hungry for more.
Göransson works inside Sinners the way he once worked inside Black Panther, as someone shaping the music of the world rather than just accompanying it. The score is a blues-grounded orchestral and band hybrid, but what truly makes it so impressive is how the multi-strand design of its harmonic language pulls from Delta blues and spirituals, and also adapts period songs and new originals into the same fabric.
Miles Caton’s “I Lied to You” carries the juke-joint seance scene with real purpose, guiding how the room behaves and how the story gathers force. The recording choices also keep the sound warm and slightly saturated, as if recorded at the juke itself. Later, “Rocky Road to Dublin” switches up the charge again, sharpening what the film is saying about power and presence. Score and song feel like parts of the same diagetic idea, which is why people are still talking about those moments nearly a year since the film first released.
Our top tracks: “Magic What We Do (Surreal Montage), “Why You Here/Before the Sun Went Down”, “Free For A Day”
1) Kangding Ray for ‘Sirāt’
Oliver Laxe’s nerve-shredding journey across the Moroccan desert following a group of ravers, moved from Cannes cause célèbre to cult object over the span of this year, and electronic-music heads and festival crowds seem to be in consensus on how this year’s Spanish Oscar submission felt closer to an existential rave experience.
Having already scooped up a bunch of awards for his work on Sirāt, including the Cannes Soundtrack Award, what makes Berlin-based French musician David Letellier, aka Kangding Ray’s score so singular is that it is genuinely structural. Conceived from the get-go and played loud and hard, the music fuses rave sound design with the rhythms of the story so tightly that makes the film’s sonic landscapes inseparable from its identity.
Technically, Kangding Ray’s work here is a study in controlled transformation. It begins as brutal, club-scale techno driven by analogue drum machines and heavy sub, then gradually dematerialises into sparse, grainy ambient textures that mirror the film’s movement from rave interiors into the void of the desert. Modular and analogue sources receive a rough, tactile texture that lines up with the 16mm image, focusing on frequency, density and silence rather than theme or motif. Many cues were also written before shooting, so camera and cutting could be timed to the music’s architecture.
All year, Kangding Ray’s pulse-pounding work seemed to be the score people pointed to for proof that a score could be corporeal, compulsive, and flat-out spectacular in a way nothing else quite managed.
Our top tracks: “Sirāt”, “Katharsis”, “La Route”, “Les Marches”
(This piece includes music from films, TV series, anime, videogames or soundtrack albums that recieved a 2025 release in India)