The Best Original Scores of 2025: How Electronic Music Took Over Film, TV, Games and Anime

If 2025 proved anything, it was that electronic and experimental musicians are no longer outsiders in film and screen scoring. This year, club-rooted producers, underground electronic artists and genre-fluid composers didn’t just support images — they defined how stories felt.

Across cinema, television, games and anime, pulse-driven sound design, modular synths and hybrid orchestration replaced traditional symphonic dominance. These scores weren’t background textures; they were emotional engines — the element audiences remembered long after the credits rolled or consoles powered down.

From dystopian coming-of-age films to prestige TV, anime epics and Game of the Year-winning RPGs, here are the original scores of 2025 that reshaped the sonic language of storytelling.

Lia Ouyang Rusli — Happyend / Sorry, Baby

Brooklyn-based experimental musician Lia Ouyang Rusli delivered two of the year’s most emotionally precise scores.

For Happyend, Neo Sora’s near-future dystopian drama set inside a surveilled Japanese high school and DJ culture, Rusli built a soundscape of shimmering synths, club-weight low end, close-mic’d piano and staccato strings. The score never stops moving — mirroring youth anxiety, surveillance, and resistance.

In Sorry, Baby, an A24 breakout about trauma and recovery, Rusli stripped everything down. Intimate piano, voice fragments and restrained electronics sit low in the mix, allowing emotional shifts to carry weight through register rather than volume.

What sets Rusli apart is total authorship — composition, performance, production and mastering collapse into a single expressive instrument.

Top tracks:
“LOVE (Variations 1 & 2)”, “Being Gay and in Love”, “The Year with the Baby”

Satoru Kosaki, Kevin Penkin & Alisa Okehazama — The Apothecary Diaries Season 2

Anime’s most ambitious score of 2025 belongs to The Apothecary Diaries Season 2.

Composers Satoru Kosaki, Kevin Penkin and Alisa Okehazama crafted a 62-track historical soundscape blending orchestral writing, chamber textures, ambient scoring and period-inflected colours.

Despite three distinct compositional voices, the score reads as one seamless imperial world — meticulously paced, melodically clear and emotionally grounded.

Top tracks:
“Ka Zuigetsu”, “Orpiment Clothing”, “The Bloodline’s Destiny”

M83 — Resurrection

French electronic group M83 composed one of the year’s most immersive cinematic albums for Bi Gan’s sci-fi epic Resurrection.

Built on hazed synth pads, processed guitars and widescreen strings, the score feels suspended in time. Harmonic simplicity stretches into long crescendos, creating a dreamlike stasis that mirrors the film’s meditation on memory and consciousness.

Rather than overwhelming the images, M83’s music breathes with the film’s shifting temporal logic — ambient, shoegaze-inflected and deeply emotional.

Top tracks:
“Spinning Fury (Part 1)”, “Sullen Passages”, “Fantasmers (Silent Film Part 2)”

Nine Inch Nails — Tron: Ares

Industrial legends Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, transformed Tron: Ares into a systems-music experiment.

Arpeggiated synths, modular pulses, filtered noise and distorted bass evolve scene by scene, building a digital architecture as important as melody. The score fully embraces NIN’s industrial DNA without sanding it down for blockbuster safety.

Even as the film divided audiences, the soundtrack became a cult obsession.

Top tracks:
“As Alive As You Need Me To Be”, “I Know You Can Feel It”, “Infiltrator”

Lorien Testard — Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Game of the Year winner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 arrived with an eight-hour score composed by Lorien Testard.

Across 154 cues, Testard fused neo-romantic orchestration with jazz, EDM, surf rock, accordion-driven chamber music and multi-layered piano writing. What makes the score unforgettable is its melodic clarity and album-like narrative arc.

Every location, faction and emotion has a distinct musical identity — making it one of the most replayed game soundtracks of the year.

Top tracks:
“Alicia”, “Lumière”, “Monoco”

Jonny Greenwood — One Battle After Another

Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood delivered one of his most relentless scores for Paul Thomas Anderson’s political thriller.

Irregular piano ostinatos, abrasive string textures and harmonic friction never let tension resolve. Greenwood plays much of the instrumentation himself alongside the London Contemporary Orchestra, maintaining absolute control over attack, texture and instability.

The result is music that feels like a permanent argument — perfectly aligned with the film’s paranoia.

Top tracks:
“Baby Charlene”, “River of Hills”, “Trust Device”

Kensuke Ushio — Dandadan S2 / Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc / Orb

Japanese composer Kensuke Ushio dominated anime scoring in 2025.

Across three radically different projects, Ushio fused techno rhythms, filtered synths and processed acoustic ensembles to score absurdity, violence, romance and philosophical wonder.

From adrenaline-heavy fight scenes to melancholic quiet, Ushio’s music didn’t just support the stories — it became how fans remembered them.

Top tracks:
“Typhoon Devil”, “Thaumazein”, “Overwhelming”

Brandon Roberts & Nicholas Britell — Andor Season 2

The final season of Andor saw Brandon Roberts expand Nicholas Britell’s established sonic language.

Unsteady brass, fractured marches and industrial percussion evolve rather than reset, culminating in the devastating Ghorman Arc — where music thickens into distortion and dread.

The remix of “Niamos!” into an in-world club hit became one of the year’s most memeable score moments.

Top tracks:
“Brasso”, “Let It Run Wild”, “Past/Present/Future”

Ludwig Göransson — Sinners

Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson crafted a blues-rooted orchestral hybrid for Ryan Coogler’s Southern vampire epic.

Drawing from Delta blues, spirituals and period recordings, the score feels lived-in, warm and dangerous. Songs and score share the same DNA — particularly in the unforgettable juke-joint sequence.

It was blockbuster scoring with deep historical intelligence.

Top tracks:
“Magic What We Do”, “Why You Here”, “Free For A Day”

Kangding Ray — Sirāt

Electronic producer Kangding Ray delivered the most corporeal score of 2025.

Built before filming began, Sirāt’s techno-driven architecture dictated camera movement, editing and pacing. Brutal rave energy gradually dissolves into grainy ambient textures as the film moves from party to existential void.

The result wasn’t accompaniment — it was structure.

Top tracks:
“Sirāt”, “Katharsis”, “La Route”, “Les Marches”

Final Takeaway

In 2025, electronic sensibility became the emotional backbone of screen music. These scores didn’t just reflect stories — they shaped memory, rhythm and physical response.

This wasn’t a trend. It was a takeover.

Related Topics:
Film Music | Soundtracks | Anime Scores | Game Music | Culture

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