By Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein

Lakeshore/Invada, out now

The score for both parts of the most recent season…

This is a mighty beast indeed – a full 80 tracks! Eighty! Ahem, it’s now become fairly frequently said that Dixon and Stein’s music for Stranger Things is reminiscent of, according to whose judgement you want to go with, the music of John Carpenter or Tangerine Dream.

They’re not wrong, and in fact this monster of an album goes way beyond that: it’s a trip back to the days of ambient electronica as a chill background play, as well as a paean to all those old late 80s and early 90s.

While it does start off with very Carpenter-like tension, which recurs throughout, this is mostly an admirable tour through the best subgenres of ambient electronica, from when the likes of Carpenter introduced those heavy Moogs to soundtracks to convey a sense of something more than human – a purpose they still serve well here – through the days when TV producers figured out that having a composer just play everything on a synth was both faster and cheaper, and into that air of going through ambiences and moods rather than themes and contextual passages.

Comparing it to the previous seasons’ soundtrack releases, there’s little that feels specific to a particular season, though there is a wider range of eras of this genre of music represented, as the show visits a decade earlier than its usual setting too. That means there are plenty of lovely nostalgic touches for whichever genre of electronica you like – anyone who has Tangerine Dream’s Tangents set, which covered 1973 to this season’s 1983 setting – or the soundtrack for The Keep will be well at home, but so too will those who enjoyed the screen compositions of Stewart Copeland or Craig Safan, or the music from The Equalizer or Airwolf. All of which were current in the show’s setting.

Rather than feeling like a TV series score, however, this simply feels like a wonderful nostalgia trip to a loved – and perhaps almost forgotten by some listeners – era of the genre. It does go through different modes and moods of cheerful adventure, threat, dread, wonder, and, well, all manner of appropriately strange things, but it feels like a personal chill-out concert backdrop. Albeit a chill-out being occasionally interrupted by tones of creeping dread and discord, but for the most part it comes over as chill nostalgia.

It’s also spectacularly good value, with that massive 80 tracks, but on the downside the approach of stuffing in everything does mean that it’s got some occasional repetition or overlong passages. These are relative rare and minor, but maybe a slight trim would have raised it a point or two, from greatness and excellence to something even higher.

Verdict: Definitely highly recommended if you’re a fan of the genre, or the show. 8/10

David A McIntee