Netflix’s four-part psychological drama “Adolescence” has struck a powerful chord globally. Written by Jack Thorne and starring Stephen Graham, the gripping series has not only captivated audiences with its raw emotional realism but also prompted calls from British Parliament to screen the show in schools and government chambers.
Directed by Philip Barantini, “Adolescence” uses a bold stylistic choice: each episode unfolds in a single, uninterrupted take, immersing viewers in the unraveling world of teenager Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), who is arrested for the murder of his classmate Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday). The fallout—through interrogations, flashpoints, and the ripples of trauma through his family and community—is laid bare in real time.
Integral to this visceral storytelling is the haunting and minimal score by composers Aaron May and David Ridley. Longtime collaborators of Barantini, including on the BAFTA-nominated “Boiling Point”, the duo was uniquely equipped to navigate the sonic challenges of this series. Scoring a single-take drama meant not just supporting the story, but adapting to its rhythm and breath. “There was an additional role that [music] plays where it comes to the forefront and is trying to reflect the internal worlds of the characters,” May explains. “We are completely and musically scoring their emotional states.”
Alongside a haunting rendition of Sting’s hit “Fragile” and incorporating the vocals of Emilia Holliday, rather than overwhelm the narrative, May and Ridley took a subtractive approach—stripping away excess to uncover a more resonant emotional core. “There’s always a temptation to layer things and make things big,” Ridley shares. “But sometimes, it’s just the simple thing that can do the trick.”
In this conversation with Awards Focus, the composing duo reflects on scoring from the inside out, recording Emilia Holliday’s vocals for the score, and crafting pivotal musical moments like Jamie’s pensive van ride in Episode One with his father Eddie’s unravelling in Episode Four.
Awards Focus: How long has it been since you finished working on the show to when it aired on Netflix? Was there a very long gap?
Aaron May: We delivered the majority of the score, or basically all of the score, around mid-December of 2024. Then, there was an additional cue that needed writing. So, since then, we’ve been on other projects. The speed that it went from delivering the final cues to the final mix to then the broadcast of the show was quite extraordinary, actually. There’s normally a larger gap. So, it was exciting to still be buzzing from the creative process of creating the score, to still have that feeling, and when it came out.
AF: The show has been so well-received. David, what’s it been like for you with the audience’s reception of the series? What kinds of reactions have you been getting?
David Ridley: Well, I think from our perspective, you are just trying to make the best overall product as possible. And we’ve worked with Phil [Barantini] many times before, and there’s always an emphasis on just finding the right sound to get under the skin of the emotions of the story that you’re trying to convey.
We’ve been absolutely blown away by the response of the public at large and the fact that it’s been global. It’s quite incredible hearing stories of people watching it. My little brother works with a Colombian colleague, and his mom was raving about it and on the phone saying, “You’ve gotta watch this.” To have something that’s become worldwide and also affecting a conversation has been brilliant. The music’s job is just to serve the drama, and I think it does, hopefully it does that well in a sort of subliminal way and just pulls you into the narrative.
AF: You both worked with Phil on the film “Boiling Point,” and I was really fascinated to hear how different the scores were for both these projects. What was it about that collaboration with him on that project that made you want to work together again?
May: “Boiling Point” was a really interesting approach to scoring for the screen. We’ve been working with Phil for quite a long time now. I think we’ve scored basically all of his screen projects. When he came to us with “Boiling Point,” the approach initially was for us to create some draft score to essentially see what role music could play within the film. Because of the one-shot nature, and particularly with the claustrophobic setting, it wasn’t initially clear what the role would be. So we created some reference scores, but it became apparent along the way that actually a more traditional score didn’t suit the film.
We ended up creating quite an interesting piece, which was the diegetic music that plays out of the speakers within the restaurant. We attempted to subtly affect the audience’s experience of the film and help ramp the tension, and mold the emotional structure of the film. So, coming from that, when we heard about “Adolescence”, we were incredibly excited because we knew that Jack [Thorne] was writing the script and he’s a bit of a national treasure over here actually. We weren’t sure if the score was going to be needed, so we just sat there for a few months just crossing our fingers, and we went to visit the set, and it was an amazing day.
We saw some of the scenes from episode four being rehearsed, and we were just hoping that when the shots came through that it would be felt that music was needed. We ended up having a really nice day with Phil and the producer Joe Johnson watching through pretty much the entire series and just talking and thinking about how music could fit and what role it could play. From then it became apparent that there was a role for music, and we were over the moon.
AF: I’m watching you both right now on the screen, and I’m counting maybe a dozen instruments behind you. How do you work out where your starting point will be, which instrument to use, and how to start layering the compositions?
Ridley: We throw a lot of shit at the wall [laughs]. We both collect instruments, and we actually sometimes buy each other instruments as birthday presents. There’s a bass recorder here that Aaron bought me last summer, and that ended up playing a role in the “Adolescence” soundtrack. We’re always trying to build,d and we spend a good period at the beginning of a project being inspired by the script or the images that we’ve seen, and then trying to react emotionally, go away from the picture for a while and just try and build sounds that resonate with the material. We call it, “building a sound world.” We’ll just be talking a lot. We’ll be talking about references, we’ll be listening to lots of music too and watching things. But it sometimes can take a while.
For “Adolescence,” it was really tough, actually, because there was no real precedent that we could think of in terms of music acting in a one-shot as it needed to in this project. So, we tried loads and loads of things, and then there’s a separate conversation about the potential of using a voice in the music.
Emelia Holliday was the actor playing Katie, who is the victim in the show. You don’t get to meet her physically, but you do see her on the CCTV footage and the different pictures of her at the beginning of the episodes. She was on set, and Phil and the entire team stressed the importance of having her around and making sure her experience of working in a TV show like this was positive, given the gravitas of the storyline and her character in particular. So, they got to know her quite well, and it turned out that she could sing very well, and she was a keen singer, and Phil was like, “What about her voice?” He sent us some voice notes of her singing. She has this very vulnerable, airy, slightly untrained voice, like on the cusp of a voice between womanhood and childhood. It was just beautiful. So, we started composing with that in mind.
That inspired thoughts around instruments that involved breath or wind. So, we started recording the bass flute and then manipulating the audio, like stretching the audio and trying to get interesting waves within it. In the background of Aaron’s studio, there is this big old Victorian bass, like a pump organ that Aaron found online. It’s dusty and it’s imperfect and it’s been sitting in this old house for 50-odd years. So we started building sound sources and then built a world around a couple of key ideas.
AF: When was that moment, Aaron, when you realized that the voice was necessary and that the undercurrent behind her with the air instruments behind it, was going to work for the show?
May: The building up of the pallet of sounds, so the air instruments, is a process that just takes quite a lot of time, probably over the course of maybe half the time that we are composing for projects. We’ll be playing with different instruments and experimenting with different sounds, and gradually the palette will be refined and limited.
We had an hour to record her in a day, which was quite close to when we delivered. So, there was a lot of pressure riding on this day. In our minds, musically and conceptually, and sonically, we got what we wanted out of her voice. But it wasn’t really until we were in the room with her that we realized that what we captured would fit so well with the score, but also with the series as a whole.
AF: There’s that beautiful rendition of Sting’s “Fragile” that plays at the end of Episode Two. Was there a consideration to bring her voice into that as well?
Ridley: It was very much both because Phil had the idea of recording, and Mark Kirby, the music supervisor, had the idea of “Fragile” being the song at the end of episode two for that shot. The lyrics resonated incredibly, but they had had the idea of doing it with the children’s choir to get the young voices in and then to use Emelia at the end. So we arranged the song and then went up to West Yorkshire to the actual town to the school where episode two is filmed,d and used students from that school. There are 35 kids, half of whom hadn’t actually sung in a choir before, and we just had two days, two full days of coaching.
We learned like a bunch of other different songs, and we recorded all these exercises as well, which we used in the score, too. So, we were always thinking in the back of our head, this is an amazing experience, but is there other things that we can do so we wanted to marry the world of “Fragile” and the children’s voices in with the rest of the score somehow to make it bleed into one another and to make it all one feeling and one vibe. So, Emelia was the soloist at the end of that. Then, at the end of that day, we were like, “Can we just get an extra hour with you? Let’s try and record all these phrases and simple sort of sounds.” So, she just had to stay on, and I think she’s probably quite tired, maybe slightly overwhelmed. It was overwhelming for everyone, including us. It really worked having that sort of tiredness at the end of it.
AF: I’m curious about two songs on the soundtrack, “Jamie in the Van” from the first episode when Jamie is being driven to the police station, and “Wainwright’s” when Eddie has his breakdown when he’s walking through the store.
Was there a relationship between those two compositions that you were trying to achieve in getting into the mind frame of the characters and also the connection between the father and son?
Ridley: That’s a really astute question. Aaron, you can answer it.
May: The role of music within the show sometimes plays a supporting role. So supporting a narrative and supporting transitions between scenes. But there was also an additional role that it plays at points where it comes a bit more to the forefront and is trying to, I guess, in a kind of impressionistic manner, reflect the internal worlds of the characters. In those two scenes, you have a father and his son, and they’re two scenes where we are completely musically scoring their emotional states.
It’s quite an interesting point because I hadn’t really thought about it. But the fact that those two pieces do have a relationship and do have similarities, and slight thematic similarities, maybe there’s a bit of comparison going on between the internal world of Jamie’s head when he is in the van and his world is falling apart, and the internal world of Eddie when he’s in Wainwright’s and he’s realizing that he can’t escape from what’s happening and he can’t escape everyone’s eyes and being in the public eye and his world is falling apart. So, you have a father and a son in two separate scenes in very different circumstances because Jamie knows that he’s committed the most heinous act. Both of their worlds are falling apart.
Ridley: And just interestingly, I remember the process and the fact that we did “Jamie in the Van” right at the beginning of the process. That was one of the scenes that we were asked for first because people wanted to know if that could work with music, and it was going to help transfer the tension that’s in that house in the first scene to the prison. “Wainwright’s” was towards the end of the process. It’s just a complete coincidence that they’re in the same tempo. I think we only realized after we’d completed it. But it’s the same sort of like you have the clock in the first one, which is exactly 60 bpm. It’s a literal recording of a clock. Then, “Wainwright’s” is just this really slow groove, but it just happens to be the same tempo, which I think is a subconscious continuation. But it’s really interesting.
AF: What did you both take away from the experience of composing for the show that you’re going to take with you into your next projects?
Ridley: That’s a great question.
May: We haven’t been asked anything like that before.
AF: I always find it interesting because you work on a project for so long that, especially for a show like “Adolescence”, it can have an impact on how you approach the next one.
Ridley: For me, this is a continual thing that you’re learning as a composer, but we did throw quite a lot more at it that ended up being in the school, both within cues and other cues that ended up being cut. I think just not to be too precious with your ideas and allow things to be presented in their most raw and most minimal form. Because it’s often the most powerful. So just sort of simmering things down until you’re left with that rich inner idea and being comfortable with that because there’s always a temptation to layer things and make things big, but sometimes it’s just the simple thing that can that can do the trick.
May: I was actually going to say almost exactly the same. It’s project by project specific, and this was clearly a piece of art that required a minimal language. But I think what we learned was a real appreciation of how much you can reduce a language, how you can increase the power of a musical language via reduction.
I think an example would be that short kind of motif that opens each show. It’s kind of like the opening credit theme. That started off significantly more complicated, and then every layer we were stripping things back, both from the melody and also from the surrounding layers and textures. It was quite surprising how much more power you could get from stripping back. There are some projects that require a maximalist approach, which is fun, and there are some projects that require a real minimalist approach. I don’t think it’s applicable to every project, but I would say one thing that’s kind of I’ve learned, which is interesting, is that a minimal approach.
Ridley: I also think that working with children for the first time in a school was amazing. Even the simple things that we did, and “Fragile,” but also with Amelia, and then also the drones and all the sort of weird textures we got from the choir. That was magical. That was magic. I would love to do that again in some capacity.