Zanobard Reviews

The Suite EP release for Benjamin Wallfisch’s Alien: Romulus is the absolute icing on the cake for that wondrously eerie soundtrack, with the standout and happily lengthy titular suite finally giving the main themes and creepy ambience of the original score the extended treatments they deserve. A must-have for Romulus music fans!

Another October, another surprise Alien soundtrack release! Last year it was The Flight’s impeccably terrifying score for Alien: Isolation finally seeing the light of day (ten years after the game released), and this year – it’s a welcome expansion of Benjamin Wallfisch’s Alien: Romulus. To say I absolutely loved that score when it first came out – see my full review for it here – is an understatement indeed, with the highlights being the intertwined main themes in Rain, the Xenomorph and Andy’s, and also the sheer atmosphere Wallfisch created that perfectly encapsulates the dark terror of the franchise. That said, I also felt that there was something slightly missing with Romulus‘ album; while the themes and the ambience were fantastic, the former never really got a big, unrestrained chance to shine. No lengthy end credits cue to fully explore their horror music versatility. It was a wish I voiced at the conclusion of my original review, and given that the end credits of the film itself also actually featured some then unreleased thematic work by Wallfisch, I hoped that one day some more Romulus score may see the light of release day. And now, amazingly – that wish has been fulfilled.

The almost fourteen minute long “Alien: Romulus Suite” opens with grand orchestral hope and wonder, almost to sort of lure you in as Rain’s four note theme reprises and swells gently, with the instrumentation bathing in gorgeously serene atmosphere. From the three minute mark though the tone then starts to shift; notes of unsettlement echo through as the two-note motif from Jerry Goldsmith’s original Alien score twinkles warily into frame, with Wallfisch’s creepy Xenomorph theme then following eerily suit on moody strings and brass. This dark and dingy ambience continues for a few further minutes, with unsettling string flutters and low-pitched brass abound (evoking the style of the original album’s opening mood-setters “Searching” and “Entering Nostromo”) before the music then begins to culminate, slowly shifting back into Rain’s cautious four-note theme that plays quietly at first on strings and wary vocals before then building with increasing volume and intensity into an immensely powerful horror-like crescendo. This is the moment I was waiting for with the entire Romulus soundtrack honestly; a big, bold, impeccably grand moment where the main theme finally gets to play in a lengthy, unapologetically emphatic and utterly unrestrained manner, and boy does it really get it here. With the dramatic power of the full orchestra then fading eerily away, a final terror in the reprisal of the imposingly gothic vocals from “The Chrysalis” then brings the fourteen minute suite to an intense close.

All-in, I’m absolutely floored by the excellence of this new suite. It’s essentially the perfect summary of Wallfisch’s score for Alien: Romulus, featuring all the best parts of the eerily unsettling ambience he so expertly evoked in the early tracks on the original album, and I absolutely love the lengthy treatment Rain’s theme in particular gets – especially towards the end of the suite in its dramatic crescendo finish. Circling back to the end credits point in the above paragraph as well, you actually hear parts of this suite play in the credits for the film, so it’s absolutely fantastic to hear that music finally released in all its lengthy glory here too. Not a minute feels wasted either, and that says a lot when its a fourteen minute track.

That’s not all this new EP release has to offer either. Alongside the suite are a number of bonus tracks, starting with the two minute “Lockdown”; a sudden crash of deafening electronics opens the piece, with bursts of tense brass, shrill vocals and high-pitched strings then simmering with nail-bitingly strained ambience for the remainder of the cue’s runtime. The subsequent and similarly two minute “Awakening” then continues evoking the unsettling atmosphere that made Wallfisch’s Romulus score so engaging in its original release with eerie strings and ghostly vocals abound in its first half, before distorted electronics and a rather atonal soundscape creepily settle for the back half. The short “Romulus Hangar Bay” then echoes moodily with serene strings and echoing brass, with the lengthier “Body Temperature” continuing similarly suit with eerie high-pitched strings and malevolent vocals fading in and out. “I Have A New Directive” then evokes Andy’s theme from the original album, with the music now having an almost despairing quality to it as vocals become shrill and strings become wary across this two and a half minute setpiece. Final track “The Hive (Part II)” (Part I being on the original score) then opens with a crash of imposingly distorted electronics before dramatic percussion kicks off action, and a series of short crescendos are then reached with increasingly tense brass and strings before a few quietly eerie reprisals of the Xenomorph theme then close out the album.

Overall, Benjamin Wallfisch’s EP release for Alien: Romulus is a well-crafted and indeed must-have addendum to the original soundtrack from last year. The star of the show is of course the fourteen minute suite that opens the EP, with its extensive thematic exploration of both Rain and the Xenomorph’s motifs together with an exquisitely unsettling summary of the eerie atmosphere from Wallfisch’s original score being its standout aspects. It’s the lengthy end credits treatment that I felt was missing in my soundtrack review of the 2024 album, bringing both themes and style together for an uninterrupted and enjoyably lengthy sequence that’s now the cherry on top of the frankly fantastically eerie score that Romulus is. And included here too are various bonus cues from the film that didn’t quite make the first album release, which all help to cement the impeccable aforementioned ambience that makes Wallfisch’s work here genuinely one of the better soundtrack entries in the Alien franchise.

All-in, we’re very lucky to get an expansion of a score so soon after its original release, and for that expansion to include a sublimely-crafted suite for an already great album as well? Phenomenal.

Score: 8.5/10

Standout Cue: Alien: Romulus Suite

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