Varčse Sarabande will release the Sicario – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack digitally and on CD September 18, 2015, the same day that the Lionsgate film premieres in limited release, before opening wide on September 25. The album features original music by Academy Award nominated composer Johann Johannsson.
Sicario debuted at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, earning rave reviews for both the film and the score. Vanity Fair Magazine called the score "rumbling, evocative" and "he [Jóhannsson] has a wonderful knack for balancing eye-popping technical flourishes with more organic texture and mood." Sicario is Jóhannsson's second collaboration with director Denis Villeneuve.
"Denis didn't use temp music while editing, so I began writing the music with a completely blank slate. This was both daunting and exhilarating," said Jóhannsson. "Like Prisoners, it's quite tense and has a certain sense of dread, but the instrumentation is very different. While Prisoners had practically no drums at all, there is a lot of percussion in Sicario; I recorded 5 different drummers and did a lot of electronic manipulation of the recordings."
"I was partly inspired by the spectral writing of composers like Gerard Grisey and Horatiu Radulescu while the percussive aspect of the score was partly inspired by the group Swans—I wanted to capture a kind of relentlessly slow and mournful but still ferocious and brutal energy," Jóhannsson described. "I used a combination of 65-piece orchestra and individual soloists, combined with extensive electronic manipulation of the recordings, to create the score. The orchestral writing is textural rather than melodic."