The scores of summer: 2017's blockbuster movie music

With today's release of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, the summer movie season has begun. With it comes some exciting new music for both high-profile, tent-pole features and small-budget indies. Here are the top ten most-anticipated summer film scores.

Alien: Covenant

A rarely-recognized fact about the Alien franchise is that the music tends to play against traditional sci-fi/horror tropes. The scores often deploying quieter, ambient cues as juxtaposition pivots to intensify the shocks, when they come: the scores are both orchestral and experimental, and have consistently featured thoughtful arrangements that illuminate the more spiritual components of the stories. With Jed Kurzel at the helm, following up Marc Streitenfeld's 2012 Prometheus effort, it will be interesting to hear how he entwines this new film with its origins in that prequel and with Jerry Goldsmith's score for the original Alien (1979).

Step

Laura Karpman continues to craft amazing work, collaborating with some of the world's finest musicians to expand and broaden her compositional palette. With this documentary, it's hard to not be inspired by the percussive flow and appreciate how her score needs to interact with the music made by the dancers on the screen.

War of the Planet of the Apes

With Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Michael Giacchino achieved a certain grandeur that's not always available to him. By and large the film was less spectacle and more character study: this allowed Giacchino to utilize his skills for more delicate orchestrations and less of the percussive/brass grandness that has become so typical of his style. As the narrative tension increases, it will be fascinating to see how he continues to bring these rich foundations into the encroaching mood of violence.

Risk

The Laura Poitras documentary on Wikileaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is going to feature work by Jeremy Flower. This is his first solo outing as a composer, with collaborative credits on Francis Ford Coppola's films Tetro and Youth Without Youth. He is a talented musicmaker whose recent projects include scores for short technology films from the MIT Mediated Matter Lab, and this documentary should allow for a compelling application of his musical sensibilities to the digital world collapse at the heart of the narrative.

A Ghost Story

Daniel Hart has been steadily working in recent years to find ways of blending traditional folk song and gothic orchestration with a classicism that's uniquely personal. He has truly developed a sound all his own, achieving great heights with last year's Pete's Dragon. This personal tale of love and loss will be a challenging return to character study for him, and by the looks of the experimental vision seen in the trailer, he should have lots of room to try new ideas.

Berlin Syndrome

Bryony Marks has made an impressive career in television, with a few smatterings of film scoring here and there. This complicated thriller from Cate Shortland will give Marks the opportunity to create heart-stopping soundscapes.

Baby Driver

The first film from Edgar Wright in quite a few years continues his collaboration with Steven Price, who has gone onto great acclaim as a composer since accomplishing the monstrous, Oscar-winning effort of Gravity. This musical of sorts, in which all the musical numbers are car chases, should be a wondrous experiment that allows Price to use the many skills he's garnered mixing traditional orchestration with innovative sound design.

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography

Legendary documentarian Errol Morris has a new film, and this time around he's collaborating with Paul Leonard-Morgan — known for his hard-hitting scores to films like Dredd, but with a true depth of knowledge that makes this pairing really interesting. Morris, being a musician himself, always uses music as a unique counterbalance to the interrogative framing and cutting of his documentaries. How Leonard-Morgan finds himself within this space — where music is privileged, but must not take center stage — will be absorbing to experience.

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

The most ambitious film of Luc Besson's career is also going to feature a score from Alexandre Desplat, who had to drop from last year's Star Wars film, Rogue One, to many a fan's dismay. Desplat is one of the most accomplished composers working today, and this film looks to be exactly the kind of stretch he needs to continue expanding his horizons.

Dunkirk

Hans Zimmer has become Christopher Nolan's closest collaborator as they work together to experiment and rediscover the boundaries of image and sound. While Interstellar (2014) earned more praise for Zimmer than for Nolan, it did question a lot of assumptions and expectations as to what audio and image should achieve together. The trailer for Dunkirk would seem to be pushing many of their experiments even further, as the composition supporting the trailer is anything but traditional. This being Nolan's first true war film, fans will be listening to hear how he and Zimmer fare on the battlefield.

Garrett Tiedemann is a writer, filmmaker, and composer who owns the multimedia lab CyNar Pictures and its record label American Residue Records.