Ludwig Göransson

Artist ∙ Soundtrack

Although composer Ludwig Göransson's father wanted to call him Albert (after bluesman Albert King), his mother insisted that the baby be named after Beethoven.

∙ Göransson met future Black Panther director Ryan Coogler at a party while they were both attending USC. He has since scored all of Coogler’s films.
∙ Donald Glover (aka Childish Gambino) met Göransson on the set of the TV show Community and asked him to coproduce his debut album, Camp.
∙ For the movie Creed, he recorded ambient sound at a Philadelphia boxing gym and worked it into the score.
∙ In 2019, Göransson’s score for Black Panther won him both an Academy Award and a Grammy Award.
∙ Göransson coproduced the band HAIM’s breakthrough EP, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Dance chart.
∙ Göransson locked himself in his studio for a month while composing the score for the Star Wars spin-off TV series The Mandalorian.

March 10, 2022 at PST
Turning Red (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Having co-written and produced the theme song for 2021’s James Bond installment No Time to Die—as well as composing the score for the 2021 teen drama The Fallout—FINNEAS continues his work for film on Turning Red, a coming-of-age tale from Disney and Pixar that features its own fictional boy band, 4*TOWN. While Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther, The Mandalorian, Trolls World Tour) handles the score and recording arrangements, FINNEAS teams up with his sister Billie Eilish to co-write three originals—“Nobody Like U,” “1 True Love,” and the Backstreet Boys-esque “U Know What’s Up”—even offering his vocal talents as band member Jesse.
32 Tracks
October 27, 2022 at PDT
Lift Me Up (From Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Music From and Inspired By) - Single
With “Lift Me Up,” Rihanna remembers the late Chadwick Boseman in Spatial.
2 Tracks
November 15, 2018 at PST
Creed II (Score & Music from the Original Motion Picture)
17 Tracks
July 20, 2023 at PDT
Oppenheimer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Barbie or Oppenheimer: which did you see first in summer 2023? If the Mark Ronson-helmed Barbie soundtrack presented a technicolor lineup of some of the biggest names in pop, the music of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is fittingly dark-hued and crafted by Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson.

In the 1940s, the American theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer gave the world the means to destroy all life in the terrifying form of the atomic bomb. In Oppenheimer, Nolan dives deep into the scientist’s struggle with the ethics of his deadly creation—and the unsettling onscreen psychodrama is only intensified by the music here. Göransson’s symphonic score combines mantralike rhythmic repetition, nerve-shredding tempo changes, keening violin melodies, and moments of intense beauty, a mix that grabs and holds the attention when consumed as a free-standing artwork.

Göransson catches the mystical qualities of quantum physics in the album’s opening sequence, interleaving the floating worlds of “Fission” and “Gravity Swallows Light” with reflective interludes linked to Oppenheimer’s life. Later, the composer distills the bleak landscape of the A-bomb’s 1945 “Ground Zero” test site into a chilling weave of electronic pulsations, white noise, and ticks taken from dosimeter radiation readings. There’s a primordial menace to tracks such as “Los Alamos” and “Colonel Pash”—the former underpinned by a manic rhythmic riff, the latter projected by unearthly electronics and desiccated melodic lines—which flows into Göransson’s final melancholy portrait of Oppenheimer.
24 Tracks
February 15, 2018 at PST
Black Panther (Original Score)
Swirls of African percussion and chorals punctuate the dramatic score.
28 Tracks
November 10, 2022 at PST
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Original Score)
When Ludwig Göransson signed on to compose the score for his longtime collaborator Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, the first thing he did was head off in search of the sounds of Wakanda, spending time with local musicians in Senegal and studying the instruments, rhythms, and nuances of local musical traditions. “Ever since I started working with Ryan, his stories and his characters that he is bringing to his stories are so vibrant,” Göransson tells Apple Music. “It's my job to make sure his storytelling is portrayed the same way in the music.” After his trip, he wove together an eclectic mix of African instruments—including the talking drum, the signature sound of Chadwick Boseman's King T'Challa—into a score that also drew classical flourishes and a hip-hop edge into the mix, winning Göransson an Oscar and a Grammy along the way.

For the sequel, he and the rest of the cast and crew were forced to recalibrate when Boseman died following complications of colon cancer. For Göransson, this meant handling the musical toolbox he’d thoughtfully curated with even more care. “The talking drum, for example, and all of those instruments and themes have so much meaning to them,” he explains. “With Chadwick's tragic passing, I was like, 'I don't know what I can use from the first movie, because everything has so much connection to him.' Whenever we use anything from the first movie, it's done with so much thought, because everything just needs to feel right.” At times, the somber strings and discordant progressions strike the tones of a requiem, and the stages of grief—denial, anger, acceptance, and more—are voiced through choirs, earth-shaking beats, and the diverse array of instruments Göransson has collected.

As Black Panther: Wakanda Forever introduces new characters, he had more to explore and incorporate into the score and soundtrack recorded on four continents with 40 different artists. The film’s antagonist, King Namor, is the leader of a subterranean kingdom that draws inspiration from Aztec manuscripts, which meant Göransson needed to refresh the musical world of Wakanda while building one for Namor’s Talokan. He went to Mexico and sought out scholars and musicians who were experts in Indigenous languages and musical traditions in Mexico City and Merida. T’Challa may have the talking drum, but Namor’s theme incorporated an ancient Mayan instrument. “I quickly realized that this music in this culture was forcibly erased,” he says. “I got connected with this incredible music archaeologist that's been studying and trying to recreate what the Mayan music sounded like. They see a codex where four people are playing turtle shells together and three people behind them playing horns, so we try to imagine what the sound was.”

There’s an instrumental version of “Lift Me Up,” Rihanna’s single from the film’s soundtrack, that serves as the score’s transcontinental connector. “It has piano, which is from Western or European culture,” he says. “It has African guitar, the kora; a couple seconds later, there's Mexican guitars, Mexican harp, guitar, guitarrón. And then you have Rihanna singing it. It feels connected, like one thing.”

Göransson’s research also took him back across the Atlantic to Lagos, Nigeria, where he and Coogler continued to expand the scope of West African music’s presence in the film. Göransson embraced traditional Nigerian instruments, amapiano, and Afrobeats while spending his days with the score’s musicians and his nights recording with Nigerian powerhouse Tems and other artists. “The only way to make the musical journey work in the story is also to go there,” he says. “I would never have these artists come to studios in LA and we're like, 'Oh, we want to do a song for this, that story,' and going to Lagos and putting ourselves in their environment and in their truth. And I think that was the key and what made this music so special and so true.”
26 Tracks
September 1, 2020 at PDT
Tenet (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Deluxe Edition]
20 Tracks
November 11, 2019 at PST
The Mandalorian: Chapter 1 (Original Score)
9 Tracks
December 17, 2020 at PST
The Mandalorian: Season 2 - Vol. 2 (Chapters 13-16) [Original Score]
16 Tracks
November 19, 2015 at PST
Creed (Original Motion Picture Score)
21 Tracks
December 26, 2019 at PST
The Mandalorian: Chapter 8 (Original Score)
11 Tracks
March 10, 2022 at PST
Turning Red (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Chinese Bonus Track Edition]
Having co-written and produced the theme song for 2021’s James Bond installment No Time to Die—as well as composing the score for the 2021 teen drama The Fallout—FINNEAS continues his work for film on Turning Red, a coming-of-age tale from Disney and Pixar that features its own fictional boy band, 4*TOWN. While Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther, The Mandalorian, Trolls World Tour) handles the score and recording arrangements, FINNEAS teams up with his sister Billie Eilish to co-write three originals—“Nobody Like U,” “1 True Love,” and the Backstreet Boys-esque “U Know What’s Up”—even offering his vocal talents as band member Jesse.
33 Tracks
January 20, 2022 at PST
The Book of Boba Fett: Vol. 1 (Chapters 1-4) [Original Soundtrack]
17 Tracks
October 4, 2018 at PDT
Venom (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
18 Tracks
March 10, 2022 at PST
Turning Red (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [Japanese Bonus Track Edition]
Having co-written and produced the theme song for 2021’s James Bond installment No Time to Die—as well as composing the score for the 2021 teen drama The Fallout—FINNEAS continues his work for film on Turning Red, a coming-of-age tale from Disney and Pixar that features its own fictional boy band, 4*TOWN. While Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther, The Mandalorian, Trolls World Tour) handles the score and recording arrangements, FINNEAS teams up with his sister Billie Eilish to co-write three originals—“Nobody Like U,” “1 True Love,” and the Backstreet Boys-esque “U Know What’s Up”—even offering his vocal talents as band member Jesse.
33 Tracks
November 14, 2019 at PST
The Mandalorian: Chapter 2 (Original Score)
8 Tracks
August 16, 2018 at PDT
Black Panther: Wakanda Remixed - EP
5 Tracks
December 15, 2016 at PST
California Loco (feat. Este Haim) [From "Inner Workings"] - Single
1 Trackfalse
December 8, 2022 at PST
Zen (Grogu and Dust Bunnies) - Single
1 Trackfalse
November 21, 2019 at PST
The Mandalorian: Chapter 3 (Original Score)
7 Tracks
November 19, 2020 at PST
The Mandalorian: Season 2 - Vol. 1 (Chapters 9-12) [Original Score]
13 Tracks
December 17, 2019 at PST
The Mandalorian: Chapter 7 (Original Score)
8 Tracks
November 28, 2019 at PST
The Mandalorian: Chapter 4 (Original Score)
8 Tracks
December 12, 2019 at PST
The Mandalorian: Chapter 6 (Original Score)
11 Tracks
February 10, 2022 at PST
The Book of Boba Fett: Vol. 2 (Chapters 5-7) [Original Soundtrack]
20 Tracks

Ludwig Göransson

Content Link

Short Link

Badges and Lockups

App Icon

QR Code