New York Comic Con 2019

As sure as the October air, NYCC 2019 has come and gone, and with it left a minor dust storm of this fall’s slate for streaming television. Much like our San Diego Comic Con writeup before it, here are just a few of the trailers that caught our ears for their diverse uses of music and sound to punch up the image.

New Walking Dead Spinoff (2020)

“In A Black Out” by Hamilton Leithauser & Rostam, a 2016 track, hazily plays on almost completely obscured in the background as dialogue takes front and centre in this unusually long—three minutes, nearly—spot for a new Walking Dead spinoff, as yet untitled but due in spring 2020 nevertheless. The choice in music speaks to a tired, languid world, with the instrumentation innocuous enough to warrant its inclusion as a backseat mood-setter rather than a driver of on-screen drama.

The Expanse (Season 4)

While voiceovers are a thing of the past, what if a thing of the past was a voiceover? Such is the case as the Season 4 trailer for The Expanse lazily—brilliantly, more like—allows John F Kennedy’s 1962 Rice Stadium moon speech play unabated against some typical epic music trailer fare as the on-screen montage teasing snippets of the episodes to come go by. The Expanse arrives on Amazon Prime December 13th.

Marvel’s Runaways (Season 3)

This trailer’s approach is to let the song have an aural cameo—as in 0:21-0:23—partly in order for a little synchronization between lyrics (“darkness is surrounding”) and the attendant image, but perhaps also for a bit of recognizability. The track—“The Warning,” a 2018 single by Seville—ought to be somewhat recognizable to the target demographic. The lyrical snippet returns for the final title card at 0:58, emphasizing this co-opting of part of the song as an audio logo of sorts.

Whether as more of an atmospheric vehicle as in the Walking Dead, something decidedly more front-and-centre as in Runaways, or something that complements, as a collaborative piece with the dialogue, as in The Expanse, music in trailers achieve similar ends through very different means, regardless of genre. Instead, it seems to be to some extent the brand cachet that works as a driver for musical approach—a trailer for Runaways probably wouldn’t work as a three-minute dialogue fest, and pushing for a new theme song of sorts for the Walking Dead would feel very off indeed.

— Curtis Perry