Darren Aronofsky wasn’t able to convince his fiancée to agree with his pick of Idles‘ scabrous 2017 track “Love Song” for the first dance at their wedding (they compromised on the Cure), but the director got the next best thing. The hard-edged U.K. band — often described as post-punk, a label they tend to reject — provided the soundtrack to his new movie, the thriller Caught Stealing, starring Austin Butler and Zoe Kravitz.
Idles contributed five new songs to the film, plus a cover of the Clash’s version of Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves,” while also performing every note of composer Rob Simonsen‘s score. “I couldn’t really find another example, except for Queen with Flash Gordon,” Aronofsky tells Rolling Stone. “The movie needed a house band.”
“The idea was that the Idles would be the orchestra,” says Simonsen, who previously collaborated with Aronofsky on 2022’s The Whale. “Which then became about learning how they create, how they think, how they process. You’re dealing with a very unique band that achieves their sound in a very unique way. So that was where we needed to start.” He jokingly suggests some friction along the way: “They were real dicks about it. But we worked through it, and then it was amazing. And it was really an organic process from that point.”
Idles learned Simonsen’s demos by ear and went from there. “It really was about being in the studio with the scenes and obviously Rob’s amazing composition,” says Idles frontman Joe Talbot. “And then just, I guess, adapting it and giving it depth with our tones and the 700 pedals that our guitarists have got.”
Before filming began, Talbot wrote five original songs, including the excellent, breakbeat-laced single “Rabbit Run,” based solely on his reading of the movie’s script. “I read it on the plane home and immediately was just seeing the music,” he recalls. “A story creates an energy, right?… The nature of the film is a man running away, not just from big scary monsters, but also from himself. And you could immediately just start imagining the pace of those songs and how they’ll work.”
The movie is set in the palpably sleazy East Village of the late Nineties, and the music aligns with that vibe. Simonsen dove into the era’s sonic palette, revisiting Massive Attack, Morcheeba, and the Prodigy. “You never want to imitate,” he says. “That’s not the point, but you wanna pull out clothes from that closet and try ’em on and feel it out and get familiar with the textures. But it was never trying to go back to those exact sounds or those machines.”
Idles have their share of Nineties influences, but mostly from the decade’s non-rock side. “A massive part of my kind of musical DNA is from the Nineties,” says Talbot, who was a teenager at the turn of the century. “I didn’t give a shit about white dudes with guitars in the Nineties. I was listening to the Pharcyde and hip-hop, which is a massive part of New York’s DNA.”
Aronofsky also wanted the score to include the ambient sounds of a rock band. “One of the things that Darren had a pretty inspired vision on was the sound of amps being plugged in and whatnot, and feedback from the guitar,” Simonsen says. “There’s like drums fumbling around and like feedback happening, trying to catch those sounds.”
Idles are nearly done with their next album, the follow-up to 2024’s Tangk, and Talbot says the soundtrack experience has “given me a real lease of life. I’m excited to go and finish the album now.”
Caught Stealing is dark and violent, but also one of the most crowd-pleasing movies of Aronofsky’s career. And while he’s in a populist mode, he admits to some interest in exploring one of our era’s most commercial genres. “‘I love music biopics,’ he says. ‘I’m a big fan. I love, like, the struggling artists, and then suddenly it works. The Johnny Cash moment at Sun Records with Joaquin was awesome. I love the genre, so who knows?’”
