Thom Yorke's Confidenza score is out on XL

Thom Yorke's score for Confidenza, Daniele Luchetti's film of Domenico Starnone's novel, is out digitally today on XL Recordings, two days after the film opened in Italian cinemas. Vinyl and CD follow on 12 July. It is his first full film score since Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria in 2018; in between he wrote songs for Edward Norton's Motherless Brooklyn. He announced it in January, days before the film's world premiere in Rotterdam.

Luchetti had emailed Yorke the script, and the answer came as music. Then at some point, while I was shooting, a piece of music arrived out of the blue with a note: 'Maybe we can work out whether we can make this film together.'⁷ The two watched the rushes together, Luchetti told Rolling Stone Italia. He passed on the oblique directions he had given his actors, and Yorke answered with musical ideas. Yorke then supervised the mix of the music in the film with Sam Petts-Davies.

Yorke sings on two of the 12 pieces. “Knife Edge” came out on Monday with a video cut by the film's editor, Ael Dallier Vega, from a scene with Elio Germano and Federica Rosellini. “Four Ways In Time” is new today, Yorke singing in octaves over strings with Tom Skinner of The Smile on muted drums. Elsewhere his voice is wordless at most, as when it joins the brass late in “Prize Giving”, the other piece shared on Monday. The opener, “The Big City”, was first heard in February, Nialler9 reported, when Yorke put it in his playlist for The Smile's Artist in Residence series on BBC 6 Music.

Petts-Davies produced the score, as he did Suspiria and The Smile's Wall of Eyes. The London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Hugh Brunt, plays the orchestral parts, and SPIN, reviewing it today, counts no audible guitars. A jazz group with Robert Stillman and Skinner plays the rest, from “Letting Down Gently”, a minute of saxophones over double bass, to the closer, “On the Ledge”, brass in a free-jazz tangle.

Confidenza, the tracklist