I was watching this Scorsese MasterClass, and another one, from the guy who was in “Happy Days” who became a director. Then, I’d write a song imagining its feelings: I’m here to protect you/I’m always here to keep you safe inside the house/But no one ever thinks about me. First, I’d imagine the door, just standing there. I would see Cassie walking down a corridor and hear synth with reverb on it, or I would see Rue and be like, “What if I made a sound that sounded like you’re drunk?” It’s literally like that for me with sounds. And you can visualize these images so vividly. You know when you’re visualizing going on holiday, you see yourself sitting on the beach with your favorite drink, with the sun coming up. I don’t think about anything but my excitement for a sound. Was there a certain way you achieved that feeling technically? No. To me, the score sounds very claustrophobic, like how teenagers can’t always see over the wall of their own emotions.

There are so many raw and gritty feelings, and some of your thoughts go to really dark places. People put this squeaky-cleanness on teens, but really it’s gnarly as hell. No diss to Ariana Grande - I think she’s a great artist - but I can’t do that kind of magic. With nothing off limits, in terms of genre or technique, how did you start to narrow things down? What sort of approach to “teenageriness” felt outside the scope of how “Euphoria” should sound? I didn’t want things to feel too commercial. Sam was like, “What if all those people did a score?” and I was like, “That sounds like heaven.” We spoke about Danny Elfman, and especially “Edward Scissorhands.” I’ve always loved that score. We spoke about Kanye and Nine Inch Nails.

He just said, “I love what you do, and I want you to do what you do on the show.”īut you must have had a general sense of the plot? No. How did Sam Levinson describe what he had in mind for the score? He didn’t describe it. Going into Season 1, how much did you know about the show? I had no idea what it was.

We talked about his evolution in Season 2 and how he figured out what “teenager” should sound like. Season 1 was his first time working on a score. Before “Euphoria,” Labrinth, 33, was best known as a pop producer. The score - which is really more like an original soundtrack - was composed by the English artist Labrinth. The soundtrack - which time-travels from Steely Dan to DMX to Baby Keem - is handled by a music supervisor named Jen Malone. What holds all this together is the music: a maximalist, genre-agnostic soundscape that includes both a licensed soundtrack and a score. The show’s creator, Sam Levinson, 37, plays liberally with flashbacks, fourth-wall-breaking asides and magical-realist fantasy. The teenagers on this show are pushing the envelope - as TV teenagers do - but here they act out with postmodern panache. Like teen soaps since the dawn of television, “Euphoria” seems to be designed primarily to shock and titillate adults, updating the time-tested tropes of the genre (cheating, revenge, domestic abuse) with a new set of even more scandalous ones (camgirls, gender, the opioid crisis). Late in the age of prestige television, we’ve arrived at what is perhaps the first prestige teen drama.

Euphoria cassie nails