Mercury Prize-winning trio Young Fathers have stepped from indie stages to the scoring booth with the release of their 24-track soundtrack for 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle’s long-gestating sequel to his genre-defining 2002 zombie thriller 28 Days Later
. The Scottish group’s brooding mix of choral chants, lo-fi beats and serrated synths marks the first time Boyle has entrusted a full feature score to artists who, as he puts it, had “never done a movie before — a huge risk, but our instinct was to go to new places”.
Boyle’s gamble reflects a wider creative pivot: while John Murphy’s adrenaline-soaked cues helped etch the original film into pop-culture memory, the director says he wanted a sound “fresh and different” to match a world three decades deeper into viral collapse. Young Fathers were already on his radar after their songs powered key moments in T2 Trainspotting and, according to the filmmaker, possess “a genre-defying, intuitive sound uniquely suited to the world of 28 Years Later”.
The soundtrack dropped 20 June on Milan Records, the same day Sony released the £60 million film in cinemas worldwide. Early ticket buyers heard its serrated opener “Promised Land” under sweeping shots of a quarantined Scottish coastline, confirming Boyle’s pledge at CineEurope last week that the film “belongs to the Highlands as much as London”.
Critics at Bloody Disgusting praised the “vocal harmonies and beats that feel like the Beach Boys on steroids” while noting the score’s capacity to “leave you on edge” alongside sound designer Johnny Byrne’s field recordings. Yet the hand-off has not pleased everyone: Reddit threads devoted to the franchise lament the absence of Murphy’s iconic theme, with one fan calling the switch “a great dishonor” to the series’ atmosphere.
Beyond the music, the film’s marketing has highlighted Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes, plus a towering “Alpha” infected played by 6-ft-8 stunt performer Chi Lewis-Parry in a much-talked-about nude scene. Producer Andrew Macdonald confirms two further instalments are already in motion, positioning Young Fathers to define the sonic palette of an entire trilogy.
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For the band—winners of the 2014 Mercury Prize for their debut Dead—the project is both baptism by fire and global showcase. As front-man Alloysious Massaquoi told Film Music Reporter, “We built most of it in a shed in Edinburgh. Danny asked for heart and horror; Scotland gave us both”.
