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A key and compelling component to Brady Corbet’s directorial debut, Scott Walker’s soundtrack for The Childhood of a Leader is Walker’s first O.S.T. work since his remarkable score for Pola X in 1999.

Partly inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story of the same name, The Childhood Of A Leader is a tense psychological drama tracing the formative years of a young boy and set against the backdrop of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference that led to the establishment of the Treaty of Versailles.

Walker continues to work with long-term collaborators Peter Walsh (co-producer) and Mark Warman (musical director), with the latter conducting an orchestra comprised of 46 string players and 16 brass for the studio recording. Both Walsh and Warman were involved in the live film score performance of The Childhood Of A Leader, alongside a 74-strong orchestra, an event which closed the Rotterdam Film Festival in February 2016. – 4AD

“The Childhood of a Leader is a clear high water mark for Walker in terms of instrumental writing, but it is also, in many ways, an apt extension of textural ideas Walker has explored on his past two albums—as well as in his previous scores for Leos Carax’s 1999 film Pola X and dance piece And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? Leader highlights Walker at a late-career stage of both creative abundance (this is his third release in four years) and stasis. “I just work in my own sound world now,” Walker explained to The Quietus in 2014. “I’ve established a sound world and developed certain tropes and things that I understand.” After decades of painstaking experimentation, he seems content tinker around in the same haunted toolshed for the foreseeable future. But don’t call it career-twilight complacency: Judging from the depth of vision in The Childhood of a Leader’s half-hour of music, there's plenty of exciting possibilities left for Walker’s musical lexicon, which continues to go unused by anyone but him.” – Pitchfork

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