A24 Music

The safe way to score a film about a cage fighter is to make the music hit. Low brass, percussion that lands on the impact, a rising figure under the training montage. It works, everyone recognises it, and it tells the audience what to feel at the moment they are already feeling it.

Nala Sinephro did approximately none of that, and the result is the most interesting thing about a soundtrack that runs barely twenty-five minutes.

Her First Score, and She Did Every Job on It

The Smashing Machine soundtrack was released on 3 October 2025 through A24 Music and Warp Records, with a vinyl edition following on 23 January 2026. Eight tracks, 25:16.

It is her first film score, and the credits are unusual to the point of being the story. She composed it, arranged it, produced it, recorded it and mixed it. The per-track credits repeat the same line down the whole record: produced, composed and arranged by Nala Sinephro, mixed by Nala Sinephro. Heba Kadry mastered it; Isabel Gracefield, Jay Sylvian and Tom Coath engineered the sessions.

For a studio film that is close to anomalous. Scores at this level are normally a division of labour, with orchestrators, additional-music writers and a mixing team, precisely because the schedule does not permit one person to hold every stage. Retaining all of it means every decision is answerable to a single set of ears.

Why a Jazz Composer Got the Call

Benny Safdie, who wrote and directed the film, approached her after listening to Endlessness, her 2024 album for Warp. The film itself is a straight-faced biographical drama about the mixed martial artist Mark Kerr, with Dwayne Johnson in the lead and Emily Blunt alongside him.

The pairing looks like miscasting on paper. It is better understood as a director hiring for contrast rather than for fit. A composer whose existing work is patient, harmonically open and built on sustain is not going to produce fight-scene punctuation, and hiring her is therefore a decision about what the film is actually about — a body being used up, rather than a sequence of contests.

Twenty-Five Minutes Against a Fight Film

The critical response is unusually consistent on this point, which is worth noting because critics rarely agree on scores at all.

Pitchfork described it as “a disarmingly rich, romantic sweep of starlit strings and yearning synths”. IndieWire observed that it “works antithetically to the toughness of the images onscreen”. The Irish Times heard it humming “with quiet menace”. Rolling Stone, less admiringly, called it “a woozy jumble of alt-jazz”, and BrooklynVegan noted it carries “the same allure as Nala’s proper albums”.

Those are five different verdicts describing the same behaviour: the music is not doing what the picture is doing. Even the unimpressed review identifies the same quality, which is generally how you can tell a stylistic choice from an accident.

The running order supports the reading. The title track alone is 8:43, a third of the entire score, while five of the eight pieces come in under two minutes — “The High” at 1:15, “Dawn II” at 1:08. That is not the shape of a cue sheet tracking scene by scene. It is one long central piece with fragments around it.

The titles reinforce it. Two of the eight are returns rather than new pieces: “Dawn” opens the record at 2:15 and “Dawn II” closes it at 1:08, while “Mark” (1:44) is answered later by “Mark II” (1:30). Bookending a score with a shortened reprise of its first idea is a novelistic move rather than a cinematic one — it assumes the listener remembers the opening, which is only true if they are listening to the record rather than watching the film. Between those bookends sit “Grand Prix” at 4:02 and “KO” at 4:41, the two pieces with titles that promise action and, characteristically, do not deliver the expected kind.

What Was in the Room at Abbey Road

The score was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in London in 2025, and Sinephro’s own instrument list is synthesizers, harp, modular synths and harmonium — an unusual combination for a film about combat sport, and one that explains the texture. Harp and harmonium both sustain and decay slowly; modular synthesis is unpredictable by design. None of them is good at hitting a cut precisely, which is presumably the point.

She did not play it alone. James Mollison contributes saxophone, Nubya Garcia saxophone and flute, Morgan Simpson drums, Lyle Barton rhodes and synthesizers, Dwayne Kilvington synth bass, with strings from the Orchestrate ensemble.

Several of those names recur from her album work, which matters more than a credit list usually does. Bringing an existing band into a first film commission means the vocabulary is already established: nobody is learning how she works while the clock runs at studio rates.

The engineering credits are worth reading too. Isabel Gracefield, Jay Sylvian and Tom Coath share the recording work across the sessions, and Heba Kadry mastered the record. Mastering is the one stage Sinephro did not keep, which is the conventional choice even among artists who do everything else: a mastering engineer is valuable precisely because they have not heard the record five hundred times.

Endlessness Is the Record That Got Her the Job

Endlessness arrived on 6 September 2024 through Warp, ten tracks titled “Continuum 1” through “Continuum 10”, running 45:19. She composed, produced, arranged and engineered that one too, and also arranged and conducted its strings.

It was received as a significant record rather than a promising one: a Metacritic score of 83, 8.5 from Pitchfork, 9 out of 10 from both PopMatters and Clash, five stars from The Skinny. It reached number one on the UK jazz and blues albums chart and ten on the independent chart, placed fifth on Pitchfork’s albums of 2024 and tenth on Paste’s, and co-won Best Jazz Record at the 2025 Libera Awards.

The continuous-numbering conceit is the relevant detail for what followed. An album built as ten movements of one idea is already closer to score-writing than to song-writing, so the film commission is less a departure than an application of the same instinct to picture. Readers interested in that long-form instinct may find our piece on jazz and the long take a useful companion.

Her instrument list on that album was almost identical, and so was the band: James Mollison, Nubya Garcia, Morgan Simpson, Lyle Barton and Dwayne Kilvington all appear on both, with the Orchestrate ensemble on strings. The film commission did not require assembling anything new.

What Doing It All Yourself Actually Buys

The obvious cost of holding every role is time, and on a film that is the scarcest thing there is. The obvious risk is that nobody catches your blind spot.

What it buys is coherence under revision. Film music gets changed late and repeatedly, as edits shift and scenes move, and every handoff in that process is a chance for intent to leak. A composer who is also the mixer can respond to a re-cut without re-explaining the idea to anyone.

That is the likeliest reason a twenty-five-minute score by a first-time film composer holds together as an object you would listen to away from the film — which, on the evidence of the reviews, is exactly how people are treating it.

The Smashing Machine (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is out on A24 Music and Warp Records.