The Uncut Gems score is the second collaboration between Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) and the Safdie brothers following Good Time in 2017, widely heralded as one of that year’s best movie scores and winner of the Cannes Soundtrack Award at the Cannes Film Festival and Original Score – Feature Film at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards.

Lopatin’s music for Uncut Gems invokes the same balance of electronic prettiness and abrasive, harsh noise that he did for Good Time. At their lushest, some of these tracks read like an updated version of the classic scoring work of Angelo Badalamenti, Vangelis and Wendy Carlos. There is an inviting dreaminess to much of Uncut Gems.

Uncut Gems stars Adam Sandler (in an outstanding career best performance). The hypnotic crime thriller follows Sandler’s Howard Ratner, a charismatic hustler always on the lookout for the next big score, in a twisted odyssey through the New York jewellery market in pursuit of the windfall of a lifetime.

Daniel Lopatin and the Safdie brothers have developed a close partnership over the years through their shared love of cult genre movies and music. As Josh Safdie recently said in an interview with Variety, “I was a fan of his music… his albums are very conceptual, and he was making basically scores for movies that didn’t exist. So when we met on Good Time, after he saw the way we were using a lot of Debussy on our film prior to that, he was like, ‘Oh let’s get deep together,’ and we’ve become very close friends.”

Uncut Gems is another impressive sojourn into the world of film scoring from Daniel Lopatin.