Series With Scores Worth Listening to on Their Own

Angelo Badalamenti's music is so bound up with Twin Peaks that the town seems to hum it. The palette is small: slow electric piano, a twangy reverb-soaked guitar, brushed drums and cool jazz bass, swinging between dreamy melancholy and finger-clicking menace. The instrumental Twin Peaks Theme won Badalamenti the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance in 1991, but Laura Palmer's Theme is the one to hear, building from a hush to an almost unbearable swell. The original soundtrack album plays beautifully from start to finish, and the first season is the easy place to fall for it; the second season wobbles in the middle before the music and the mood come roaring back.

This is the 1998 anime, not the 2021 live-action remake. Yoko Kanno put together the band Seatbelts in 1998 specifically to play its soundtrack, and you can hear a working group rather than a composer's sketches: big-band bebop, smoky blues, funk and quiet piano ballads, all in one series. Tank!, the opening number with its long alto saxophone solo, gets the attention, but the soundtrack albums go much further than the theme. It is an ideal first anime for a jazz lover, because the music sets each episode's mood as much as the story does.

Michael Giacchino won the 2005 Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series for the pilot, and the score kept growing for six seasons. It is a live orchestra pushed to extremes: trombone blasts and jabbing strings for the island's threats, and aching, simple string themes for the survivors that return and deepen as their stories are resolved. The mythology frustrates some viewers by the end, but the music never loses its grip, and the soundtrack albums let you follow the character themes without the cliffhangers. Start with the first season's album, then jump to the finale's music once you have watched it.

This is the 2004 reimagined series. Bear McCreary threw out the brass fanfares space opera usually reaches for and built the score from taiko-style drumming and world instruments, with the Armenian duduk as its most-used melodic voice. The result sounds ancient and desperate at once, which suits a fleet running for its life. Battle cues are all pounding percussion; the quieter pieces carry mournful duduk and vocal lines that stay with you after the credits. The four seasons are tense and the final stretch divides fans, but the soundtrack albums are some of the most rewarding science fiction scores to play straight through.

Ramin Djawadi gave every great house a musical identity and then let those themes fight, merge and decay across eight seasons, which makes the soundtrack albums a story of their own. The cello-led main theme is everywhere, but the score's real reward is hearing a family's motif turn up in a minor key when its fortunes change. The piece to start with is Light of the Seven from the sixth-season finale, close to ten minutes of piano, organ, strings and boy soloists, and the first time piano is heard in the show's music. Djawadi won the 2018 Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series for The Dragon and the Wolf. The final season divides viewers; its music is not the problem.

Brian Reitzell's score for the NBC series is closer to experimental sound art than to a crime-drama soundtrack. Percussion, especially tuned percussion, is the main voice, alongside bowed percussion, bullroarers and a rare synthesiser called the Swarmatron, so cues seem to creak, breathe and swarm rather than play a tune. It is not background music for dinner: the albums are unsettling and often abrasive, and the reward is texture rather than melody. If you enjoy ambient and drone records, nothing else on television sounds like it, and the three seasons grow stranger and more operatic as they go.

Max Richter, one of the best-known names in modern classical minimalism, scored all three seasons, and his slow strings and piano carry so much grief that the music often says what the characters cannot. A handful of simple themes return again and again, changed a little each time, so you feel the years passing. If you already love Richter's concert albums, the season one soundtrack, with pieces such as The Departure, sits comfortably beside them. The first season is heavy going, so be patient: the series and its music open out remarkably in the second and third.

Mac Quayle's electronic score sounds like the inside of its hacker hero's head: pulsing analogue synths, nervous arpeggios and sudden drops into near silence. It won him the 2016 Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series for the pilot, eps1.0_hellofriend.mov. The show does use well-chosen licensed songs, but the synth score is what drives its paranoia, and the soundtrack volumes work as dark electronic albums in their own right. Fans of 1980s synth soundtracks and modern darkwave will feel at home; the second season is slower, and the music keeps the tension up while the plot takes its time.

Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, of the synth band Survive, built the score on vintage-style analogue synthesisers, and that warm, buzzing sound did as much as the bikes and walkie-talkies to put viewers in the 1980s. Their main title theme won the 2017 Emmy for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music. The series is also famous for its 1980s pop hits, so it sits on the edge of this list's rule, but the original score is substantial and does the real atmospheric work. The first season's soundtrack volumes are the purest listen: patient, glowing and eerie, closer to an ambient synth record than to a television album.

Ramin Djawadi's second entry here works almost as a puzzle box. Alongside a cold, mechanical main theme for piano and strings, he arranged rock songs for the saloon's player piano, from Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun to Radiohead's No Surprises, so the park's old-time music keeps hinting at the modern world behind it. The player-piano pieces are covers, but they are Djawadi's arrangements made for the show, and they sit naturally beside his original cues on the first season's album. That first season is the high point for both story and score; later seasons get more convoluted, though the music stays inventive.

The German time-travel series is scored by Ben Frost, an Iceland-based Australian experimental composer, and his music is a slow, grinding wall of low drones, distorted strings and electronic rumble that makes the forest caves feel bottomless. Rather than tunes, it offers pressure that builds and refuses to release. Frost scored all three seasons, and the music was released as a series of albums titled Dark: Cycle, which suit late-night listening with headphones. The plot demands close attention and a notebook helps, but the sound tells you when something terrible is about to repeat itself.

Nicholas Britell's music is the Roy family's portrait painted in sound: dissonant, faintly 18th-century piano and grand strings for old money, undercut by hip-hop drums that hint at how hollow and modern it all is. The main title theme won the 2019 Emmy for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music, but the score runs well beyond it, with off-kilter piano pieces that sound like a court composer quietly mocking his patrons. The soundtrack albums play like a long suite in variations, as the theme keeps returning in new disguises, which rewards listening across the seasons. It is a comedy as much as a drama, and the music is in on the joke.

Hildur Guðnadóttir built this score from recordings made at the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania, and you can hear it: hums, clanks, groaning metal and the hiss of machinery, shaped into music that sounds like radiation might if it had a voice. A distant choir surfaces only now and then, which makes those moments devastating. It won the 2019 Emmy for music composition for a limited series, for the episode Please Remain Calm. This is a five-episode miniseries, so the soundtrack album is short and best heard in one sitting with headphones. It is bleak listening by design and not for cheering up a dull afternoon.

Ludwig Göransson's first notes are a breathy bass recorder that he played himself, processed until it sounds like a flute from another planet. From there the score mixes spaghetti-western guitar, synths, drum machines and a full orchestra, giving Star Wars a sound that owes almost nothing to the films' symphonic tradition. It won the Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series two years running, for Chapter 8: Redemption in 2020 and Chapter 16: The Rescue in 2021. The first two seasons are the place to start, both for the story and for Göransson's music, and the soundtrack albums are generous enough to play right through.

Cristobal Tapia de Veer's score is the anxiety the guests will not admit to: thundering drums, yelping and wailing voices and woozy, off-balance melodies that make a luxury resort feel like a trap closing. Each season moves to a new location, and the music shifts its colour to match while keeping the same sense of dread. He won the 2023 Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series for In the Sandbox, from the second season. The soundtrack albums are wild, percussive and often very funny, a long way from polite hotel lounge music, and they make a lively change from the brooding scores elsewhere on this list.

Theodore Shapiro's score is built around a melancholy piano figure that keeps circling back, like a worker repeating the same task, set over synth pads and strings that turn from calm to sinister as the office's secrets surface. It is restrained, precise music that matches the show's clean, eerie look. Shapiro has won the Emmy for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series twice, for The We We Are in 2022 and Cold Harbor in 2025, both season finales. The soundtrack albums make excellent focus music, which is a slightly unsettling thing to say about a show about work.

Nicholas Britell scored the first season, and it sounds nothing like his Succession work or like a typical Star Wars score: the music shifts from planet to planet, with clanking industrial percussion, synth pulses and stirring brass that grows more defiant as the rebellion takes shape. Brandon Roberts took over for the second and final season and earned a 2025 Emmy nomination, keeping the score grounded while raising the scale. The first few episodes are slow to start, but by the end of season one the music has become one of the show's main storytellers, and the album rewards anyone who thinks Star Wars music begins and ends with John Williams.

Gustavo Santaolalla wrote the music for the original games and returned for the HBO series, sharing the score with David Fleming. Its signature is the ronroco, a small Andean string instrument, plucked in a gentle 6/8 lilt: intimate and folksy where you might expect horror-movie strings, which is why it hits so hard in the quiet moments. Santaolalla's sparse guitar and ronroco pieces sit alongside Fleming's darker orchestral and electronic tension cues, and the albums move between the two. The score uses silence boldly; much of the show plays without music, so when the ronroco arrives it means something. Players of the games will recognise the theme at once.

This is the 2024 FX series, not the 1980 miniseries. Atticus Ross, Leopold Ross and Nick Chuba spent over two years on it, working with the gagaku specialist Taro Ishida to record traditional Japanese phrases on instruments such as the shakuhachi, hichiriki, koto, biwa and taiko, then reshaping those recordings into custom instruments of their own. The result is neither a period pastiche nor a standard action score: ancient court sounds bend and blur into electronic textures, with the raspy hichiriki as one of its signatures. Anyone who likes Atticus Ross's film scores with Trent Reznor will hear a family resemblance, and the soundtrack is one of the most original television scores of the decade.