Arcade Fire Her Soundtrack

Arcade Fire‘s patchy last album Reflektor might not have been for everyone, but their score for Spike Jonze’s acclaimed new movie Her sets them well back on track. Oddly enough, the Reflektor and the Her score we conceived somewhat simultaneously – album track ‘Supersymmetry’ was written specifically for the film – but Her also features plenty of original music. Helped out by regular collaborator Owen Pallett (aka Final Fantasy), the material shimmers beautifully alongside Jonze’s sombre and oftentimes chilling statement on love in the digital age.

Jonze explained that Arcade Fire simultaneously worked on the score and Reflektor, and that “Supersymmetry” was originally written with the film in mind. “Win [Butler] and I started talking…

…about the score about two years ago, and then it kinda seemed like the record sort of informed the soundtrack and the soundtrack informed the record a little bit, and there’s like a song on [Reflektor]—the last one, ‘Supersymmetry’—that he wrote for the movie, but then it sort of became something else. It’s actually the last song in the end credits.”

Her stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man who falls in love with an intelligent computer operating system named Samathana (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). When it came to the soundtrack, Jonze said they wanted “for it not to feel synthetic, but to feel like hand-made, but still have an electricity to it, and also just to sort of play this sort of romance and love story and longing of [Phoenix's character] Theodore.”

1. Sleepwalker (03:16)
2. Milk & Honey (01:28)
3. Loneliness #3 (Night Talking) (03:26)
4. Divorce Papers (03:17)
5. Morning Talk/Supersymmetry (04:15)
6. Some Other Place (03:39)
7. Song On The Beach (03:32)
8. Loneliness #4 (Other People’s Letters) (01:02)
9. Owl (02:23)
10. Photograph (02:29)
11. Milk & Honey (Alan Watts & 641) (03:19)
12. We’re All Leaving (02:32)
13. Dimensions (05:42)