Nearly one decade after infusing The Strangers: Prey at Night with a pulse-pounding score that perfectly complemented the scares on screen, composer Adrian Johnston is reuniting with director Johannes Roberts for his new movie Primate. With the tropical horror film now playing in theaters and Primate—Music from the Motion Picture coming to digital platforms on January 9th from Lakeshore Records, we have an exclusive premiere of the track “First Bite” that provides a synth-soaked sample of Johnston’s latest nerve-shredding score!
You can listen to our exclusive track premiere of “First Bite” below, and we also have the cover art and official press release with additional details on Primate—Music from the Motion Picture. To learn more about Johnston’s new score, be sure to visit:
Press Release: Lakeshore Records is releasing Primate—Music from the Motion Picture digitally January 9 featuring music by Emmy® Award-winning composer Adrian Johnston (Shackleton). Johnston’s analog synth-based score incorporates manipulated sounds from found objects that vividly portray the characters’ themes and shifting moods of the horror thriller. The Paramount Pictures film is released today in theaters.
In Primate, a group of friends’ tropical vacation turns into a terrifying, primal tale of horror and survival.
Notes Johnston: “Synths were the key ingredient of the score. Filter-sweeping and arpeggiating analog synths flavor the opening section of the film as the principal characters arrive on the island paradise to the retro sound of Synthwave.
Interweaving through all this were the sounds from a specially created rack of found percussion, ironwork, pipes, corrugated metal, and detuned beer kegs which were appropriately hit, bowed, or scraped. Piano and organ also feature prominently, particularly at key dramatic moments to achieve almost operatic Grand Guignol climaxes.
But on the whole, we wanted the synths to do the work, avoiding the dissonant string textural palette which is so often a part of the horror score vocabulary.”
Purchase/ Stream: https://orcd.co/primate
Track List
01. Hydrophobia
02. Primate Theme – Main Title
03. Home To Hawaii
04. Ben Miss Lucy
05. The Pool
06. You Scared Me, Ben
07. How Did Ben Get Out?
08. Tie Him Up
09. What’s Wrong, Ben?
10. First Bite
11. Over The Edge
12. We Need To Get The Float
13. It’s Not Ben Anymore
14. Back To The House
15. Bad Lucy
16. Tug Of War
17. Hot Guys Plane
18. Double Kill
19. Run Hannah
20. Car Kill
21. Shard Of Glass
22. Sisters Fight Back
23. Final Showdown
24. Back From The Dead
25. Primate End Credits
ABOUT ADRIAN JOHNSTON
Adrian Johnston was born in the north of England and spent his formative years playing piano, ukulele, drums, and percussion with local orchestras and bands. While studying English Literature at Edinburgh University, he drummed for an early formation of Mike Scott’s The Waterboys and was inspired to write and perform a live score to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. He would go on to play new live scores for silent movies at film festivals and cinematheques throughout Europe, developing a unique multi-instrumental, one-man-band approach. He wrote the first live score for Frank Borzage’s rediscovered Lucky Star, which he subsequently played at the Telluride Film Festival and in Washington, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.
During the same period, he co-founded an independent touring theatre company, The Shadow Syndicate, for whom he wrote music and occasionally acted, memorably as Renfield the fly-eating madman in The Last Days of the Nosferatu. With the director of that show, Jon Pope, he collaborated on stage adaptations of more Gothic works, including Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood and a version of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers with Moira Shearer.
Primate is his 35th score for a feature film, following the Martin Scorsese-presented documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger. Earlier horror scores include the Roger Corman-produced The Suicide Club; Billy O’Brien’s Isolation and I Am Not a Serial Killer; and Johannes Roberts’ The Strangers: Prey at Night. His extensive television credits include the ongoing HBO Max limited-drama series C. B. Strike.
Working from a deconsecrated chapel in the English countryside, he has won an Emmy award, a BAFTA award, and three Royal Television Society awards.
ABOUT LAKESHORE RECORDS
Lakeshore Records is a GRAMMY-winning record label, and the soundtrack arm of the Cutting Edge Group. Lakeshore Records is the global independent leader in top line soundtrack album releases, including such popular, critically acclaimed and classic soundtracks as Bridgerton, Stranger Things, Wednesday, Fallout, John Wick, Whiplash, Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Drive, Cyberpunk 2077 / Edgerunners, Star Trek: Picard, Bojack Horseman, The Walking Dead, Napoleon Dynamite, Red Dead Redemption 2, the Grammy-winning Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok, the Academy Award nominated Lady Bird and Academy Award winners Moonlight, Little Miss Sunshine, American Factory, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Hurt Locker and many, many more.
For more information, contact: www.lakeshorerecords.com
Read Lakeshore’s blog Soundtracks, Scores And More here: https://soundtracksscoresandmore.com