Jonny Greenwood's Great New PTA Score

Plus: A Tribute To "Unsung" American Rock Band The Cars

If you haven’t seen One Battle After Another, there are some mild spoilers ahead.

I saw One Battle After Another for the second time this week. It wasn’t in IMAX, it was an off-brand version of IMAX that happened to be closer to my house but nonetheless looked and sounded huge and magnificent. I wrote some loose thoughts in the last newsletter about my inaugural viewing, and this latest one was even funnier, more emotional, and altogether greater in pretty much every way. I love this freaking movie! I plan to see it at least one more time in a theater, at which time I might write something more about the film overall. But for now, since I’m a music critic and this is a music criticism newsletter, let’s talk about how this movie sounds.

I was paying extra close attention this time to how Paul Thomas Anderson uses music in OBAA, and how he doesn’t use music. For this discussion, I want to focus on the two big car chases. The first, which takes place after the botched bank robbery that leads to Perfidia’s arrest, is filmed verité style in a manner that recalls one of Anderson’s acknowledged influences, William Friedkin’s The French Connection. Like the iconic car chase in that film, PTA presents his sequence sans score, giving it hard-hitting, documentary-like authenticity. Putting score here would have conflicted with the more important music, namely those crunching metal and siren sounds.

The second car chase, which happens to be the movie’s most celebrated sequence set on a stretch of road near Borrego Springs in California known as “The Texas Dip,” is set to music written by Anderson’s long-time collaborator Jonny Greenwood. Only it’s not the kind of score that Greenwood has typically composed for PTA.

In two of his best PTA scores, for There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, Greenwood’s job was to create music for scenes in which people were mostly talking to each other in rooms. His compositions provide atmosphere and emotional texture, but they also convey the interiority of the characters’ inner lives. Those films are about broken, jittery individuals, and Greenwood’s melodies are similarly fractured and nervy. He is, ultimately, drawing the audience deeper into the moods of Anderson’s settings and the psychology of his protagonists, as an expert film composer does.

Greenwood continues to do that in One Battle After Another, but he’s also doing something that’s more (for lack of a better term) conventional: He’s creating music for big and expensive action sequences. Therefore, the assignment is to ramp up the tension at all costs, using proven tricks of the trade like jarring percussion and staccato string parts. And that’s what Jonny does. When you watch the climactic car chase, and see the three cars piloted by Bob, Willa, and the bounty hunter Tim Smith bob up and down that tense stretch of road, what’s evoked by PTA’s virtuosic direction and Greenwood’s propulsive music is none other than Steven Spielberg and John Williams shamelessly manipulating the audience’s emotions at the end of Jaws, using those same tricks of the trade. Listen to “River Of Hills” and tell me you don’t hear echoes of that unmistakable shark music. (The waves of road even emulate the waves of the Atlantic Ocean.)

I also thought of John Williams in the scene immediately after the car chase is resolved, when Bob and Willa are reunited and the mutual melodies of the trackers they have carried for the past 15 years are repurposed for the “Trust Device” portion of Greenwood’s score. It made me think about the five-note phrase that’s used by humans to communicate with the aliens in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and how that music takes on its own emotional resonance by the end of the film.

Greenwood is rightly celebrated for his contributions to PTA’s films. As I wrote in 2018, his partnership with the director is not unlike his union with Thom Yorke in Radiohead: “If Yorke is Radiohead’s writer-director figure, the equivalent to PTA, then Greenwood is like a hybrid of cinematographer, composer, and executive producer — a supplier of mood and texture, as well as a fix-it man.”

But Greenwood’s PTA scores also work surprisingly well as stand-alone albums. When I ranked the entirety of Radiohead’s discography a few years ago — taking into account solo records and side projects along with proper band releases — I put There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread in my Top 10, just ahead of Pablo Honey and right behind Yorke’s The Eraser. Kind of a bold choice, in retrospect, but I stand behind it. Here was my argument:

How do I justify putting two Jonny Greenwood film scores in the Top 10? Because There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread are the OK Computer and Kid A of Jonny Greenwood film scores. They represent his greatest solo work, and they are among the best film scores by anyone in the modern era. Of all the Radiohead-adjacent albums, they feel the most consequential. More than anything, they are what put Jonny on the map as an all-time film composer. And they also function as satisfying stand-alone albums.

My favorite Jonny film score keeps changing but right now here’s my verdict: There Will Be Blood is the more bracing, knock-you-over-the-head-with-a-bowling-pin listen, but over time I’ve come to love Phantom Thread just a little bit more. It is the most flat-out beautiful music Jonny has ever made, fully deserving of the sumptuous treatment he gives it. The achievement here really can’t be overstated: Before Jonny Greenwood, a British rock musician working with a symphony orchestra was a Spinal Tap joke. It was a sign of extreme pretension reserved for the shame-free denizens of Emerson Lake And Palmer. Jonny changed that. This is his genius.

If I maintain the analogy of this passage, One Battle After Another feels like the In Rainbows of Jonny Greenwood scores, the “mature” work that might very well prove to be his best. It’s certainly the film music that sounds most similar to Radiohead music, particularly the pieces I shared above. I would also “Baby Charlene” to that mix. I can definitely imagine Thom Yorke singing over this.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first PTA film in over 20 years to be set in the present would also inspire the most modern sounding Jonny Greenwood film music. As it is, it’s thrilling to hear two of our greatest artists working in tandem at such an exceptional level.

FURTHER READING

Over at The Ringer, I wrote a long article about The Cars, a great American band that often isn’t mentioned in conversations about great American bands. The occasion was Bill Janovitz’s new biography, which taught me a lot about a band I started listening to when I first saw “You Might Think” and “Magic” and “Drive” on MTV when I was 6 or so years old. Here’s (part of) my case for their greatness:

It might seem strange to describe a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame band as “unsung.” They certainly aren’t some obscure cult act: The Cars have sold 23 million albums in just the United States. (About a quarter of that is for the first record alone.) They have 13 Top 40 hits, and they were the first recipient of an MTV Video of the Year VMA, for 1984’s “You Might Think.” And then there’s the matter of their aforementioned classic-rock radio dominance, which might have had a detrimental impact on their legacy, depending on whether you view being put in the same context as REO Speedwagon and Styx as a good thing. (It’s not.)

It’s a weird place to be for someone like Ocasek, a Zelig-like figure who was producing records by Suicide and Bad Brains around the time he was starring in music videos with future wife and swimsuit model Paulina Porizkova. But that AOR/MOR image has flattened the Cars into a band that appears less interesting than they really are.

So, yes, while they were inducted into the Rock Hall, the timing of that induction offers a clue about how they are perceived. It occurred after their third nomination, 15 years after they were originally eligible, a sign of “respectable, but not absolutely essential” status. In their heyday, even as they were selling millions of records, they didn’t have the sort of romantic “cult of personality” worship afforded less successful contemporaries like the Ramones, Talking Heads, or the Clash. On the contrary, more than any other punk-adjacent band parceled into the more commercially acceptable “New Wave” category, the Cars were singled out for criticism as a too-slick pop sellout. One of those critics was Susan Orlean, who penned a skeptical profile for a Portland alt-weekly in the late ’70s, years before she became a literary celebrity. She characterized them as “a middle-brow retread of punk,” but the article’s snarkiest assessment came from Easton, who sarcastically (or not) described his band as “a calculated combination of coliseum rock and punk rock, designed to steal away children’s money.”

But while they did indeed “steal” a lot of money from kids at the time, they also never ascended to unquestioned “biggest band in the world” standing like the Police or (a little later) U2 and R.E.M. And no matter their reputation as early MTV pioneers, they didn’t have the visual appeal of Devo, the B-52’s, or Blondie. With the exceptions of Ocasek (a towering Ichabod Crane–type figure who looked like he could have been Joey Ramone’s older brother) and Orr (who was teen-idol cute well into his 30s), they were average-looking guys. (As drummer Robinson once remarked to critic Jon Pareles, “We played real good, but we looked real funny.”) Plus, they were notoriously boring as a live act; Janovitz quotes one early observer who calls them “the original shoegazers, but their songs were so good, it didn’t matter.”

Which brings me back to Flowers: If saying that a classic-rock dinosaur still sounds like a new band seems like hyperbolic puffery, I’d argue it’s supported by the facts. In his speech, Flowers mentions discovering the Cars in 1994, a decade after the peak of their MTV popularity. The same year, Kurt Cobain opened his final Nirvana concert with a cover of “My Best Friend’s Girl,” one of the first songs he ever learned on a guitar. Two months after that show, Weezer released their self-titled debut, produced by Ocasek, which replicated the “heavy guitars plus synths” sound of the Cars for a new generation, inspiring a rising cohort of emo bands in the ’90s and beyond. About a decade after that, in the mid-aughts, Fountains of Wayne were even more overt about ripping off the Cars’ first album on their novelty hit “Stacy’s Mom,” while Flowers’s band, the Killers, mined their dreamier ’80s work. (That specific influence also extended to the alt-metal band Deftones, who covered the luminous ballad “Drive,” a top-three hit from 1984, on 2011’s Covers. In more recent years, that song has also been covered by Bleachers, Soccer Mommy, and Aimee Mann, among others.) About a decade after that, Car Seat Headrest straight up lifted the opening lines from “Just What I Needed” for 2016’s “Just What I Needed/Not Just What I Needed,” which caused some legal problems.

Listen to the Cars in 2025, and you’ll hear the accumulated history of 20th-century rock music—the elemental directness of Buddy Holly and Elvis records, the songwriting sturdiness of the Beatles and Beach Boys, the art-pop leanings of the Velvet Underground and Roxy Music, the electronic minimalism of Brian Eno and Kraftwerk, the arena-rock accessibility of Tom Petty and Cheap Trick. And you’ll also notice signs pointing to a lot of music that came after, including large swaths of indie, punk, and alternative rock.

It’s incredible how much new rock music still sounds like them—you hear traces of their synth-rock and pop-punk hybrids in everything from Olivia Rodrigo to sombr to the 1975. Even now, the Cars remain omnipresent. And kind of invisible.

RECOMMENDATION CORNER

Over at Uproxx, I published my round-up of favorite music from September 2025. What a month! A lot of what I mentioned will be familiar to readers of this newsletter, but I do want to shoutout someone I haven’t talked about here yet, the Minneapolis singer-songwriter Will Olsen. “These are, essentially, demo recordings for what ought to be a million-dollar pop-rock record,” I write, “though Olsen’s songs sound just right in their simpler, stripped-down form. With melodies this good — they remind me of The Waterboys with a dash of L.A. Garage Sessions ’83 era Springsteen — you don’t need much (or any) production.” Well said, if I do say so myself!