First Listen: 'The Dark Knight' Discordant Score By Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard

There’s been a lot of talk of the atonal and “industrial” score that Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard came up with for “The Dark Knight,” and they weren’t kidding. The cacophonous score is totally submerged in pounding, texturally crunchy percussive ruptures and searing apocalyptic cellos stained with gloom and dread. Not to mention the whisping eerie sounds emanating from speakers like apparitions.

“I just wanted to come up with things that nobody had ever heard before … in a very psychological way,” Zimmer told Reuters recently. “How can you go from ‘This is slightly worrying’ to ‘terrifying’ to ‘sh–ting bricks?’ ” You’ll recall after Heath Ledger’s death Zimmer almost scrapped the terrorizing Joker theme cause he felt it might be too dark, but changed his mind eventually.

In the liner notes director Christopher Nolan wrote that one of his inspirations for revisiting the Batman franchise was because of the extraordinary music they had created, “Their [‘Batman Begins’] music was more innovative than people realized, and in the years since I haven’t seen a trailer for a big action movie that didn’t reference their work. Clearly we wouldn’t need much in the way of new music to continue our story in ‘The Dark Knight.’ “

We’ve got three of the more discordant tracks from the film centering on Heath Ledger’s Joker. “Why So Serious,” his theme, is particularly excellent, but the others are really disconcerting too (if you’re having trouble seeing all three tracks in the embed go here for the full three tracks).