‘If We Don’t Have Him Sing, We Should All Be Fired’ — How Music and Sound Helped Bring ‘The Boys’ Home

When the Amazon series “The Boys” premiered in 2019, it won a devoted fan base with its bold and irreverent take on the superhero genre. Under showrunner Eric Kripke‘s guidance, the story of vigilantes taking on “supes” (people with superpowers who use them for nefarious rather than heroic purposes) satirized both contemporary politics and comic book conventions, often with graphic gore, extreme vulgarity, and a deeply cynical point of view.

Yet “The Boys” also has a sincere side, with Kripke balancing the show’s more outrageous elements with moments of genuine moral conflict and pathos (much as he did on his hit show “Supernatural”). The emotions that have always been bubbling underneath the surface came to the forefront in the show’s fifth and final season, in which Kripke and his collaborators found poignant, affecting — and occasionally gross and hilarious — ways of saying goodbye to the outcast characters audiences had come to know and love.

For composers Christopher Lennertz and Matt Bowen, the emotional depth of the final season came as a bit of a surprise. “We knew it was the last season, but I wasn’t really prepared for how much emotional music was going to be in the season, especially the last two episodes,” Lennertz told IndieWire. “We were saying goodbye to multiple main characters in single episodes, so there was a lot more orchestra.” In a way, the finale brought the music full circle back to what it was like in the first season.

“We had quite a bit of music in the first season that was more legit superhero music,” Lennertz said. “The audience didn’t know the Supes were assholes yet. So the music didn’t necessarily have the grit and violence and out-of-tune stuff that started to come later. As things got crazier with our heroes and the Supes, things became more dissonant. The beginning of the show had this dichotomy between good and bad, then it was all ugly, and then it took this turn into the emotion of saying goodbye to characters that all of us have grown to love and connect to.”

“We’re just responding to how the show is evolving,” Bowen added. “In the beginning, there’s a lot of swagger and winking, and then it gets darker and darker. Then we come to this finale where the writing and performing and the edit were all very cinematic, and we got to respond to that with music that was very cinematic relative to where we had been in our universe.”

‘The Boys’Jasper Savage/Prime

One musical highlight of Season 5 was “Raise Him Up,” a song written by Lennertz and actor Daveed Diggs, who joined “The Boys” this season as corrupt religious supe “O Father.” “I was in London working on a movie, and I saw that Daveed Diggs had been cast in the show,” Lennertz said. “I didn’t even know what part, but I immediately texted Eric, ‘If Daveed is in this show and we don’t have him sing, we should all be fired.'” Over six months passed, and then Kripke emailed Lennertz with the news: he needed a song for Oh Father to sing announcing that main bad guy, Homelander (Anthony Starr), is God.

Lennertz and Diggs got to work, and their first version was, in Lennertz’s words, “a total whiff. We had this Travis Scott/Childish Gambino-like swagger rap thing. And Kripke was like, ‘Absolutely not. He’s an old-fashioned soulful Southern preacher.'” Looking to gospel and rhythm and blues music for inspiration, Lennertz and Diggs landed on the rousing, catchy tune that ended up anchoring one of the most memorable set pieces of the entire series.

Throughout the series, Lennertz and Bowen were concerned with finding a musical language for the characters, and often tried to find corollaries in their instrumentation for the actors’ gestures and expressions. “In Season 4, there was a whole other set of facial tics for Homelander because he was grappling with the idea of mortality,” Bowen said. Initially, the composers used a violin cadenza theme they had created for Homelander earlier in the series — one designed to provide a musical “inner monologue” — but Kripke rejected it.

“He said, ‘We’re in a different part of his brain now,'” Bowen said. “So we created a scratchy, out-of-control cello thing that was all distorted.” Lennertz added that the cello sound was associated with Homeland’s discovery that he had gray pubic hairs — pointing once again to the show’s tendency to undercut moments of utmost seriousness (at least for the characters) with juvenile humor. That tonal high-wire act extended throughout the series beyond the music and into the work of the entire post-production sound team.

“It was really an evolution that started in Season 1, figuring out how far we could go,” supervising sound editor Wade Barnett said. From the beginning, the sound team wanted their work to express character just as the music did. “We were very specific about whose punches sound a certain way, whether they have powers or through their story arc, and adjusted the mix and editorial.” Initially, Barnett expected Kripke or Amazon to push back against the extremity of the blood and gore sounds, but he found the reaction was the opposite.

“We were expecting Eric to say to pull it back, but he was saying to go further,” Barnett said. “It evolved over the years until we got it dialed in.” According to re-recording mixer Alexandra Fehrman, each punch is often made up of over 40 different samples shaped by another re-recording mixer on the show, Rich Weingart. “It’s a real ballet between us,” Weingart said. “Alexandra establishes a benchmark with her dialogue and music, then I go through and tweak it so you hear every painful aspect of every punch — not only their powers, but the results of their powers.”

‘The Boys’Jasper Savage/Prime

Between music, effects, and dialogue, Weingart said the show is “a 10-gallon hat, but we get 20 gallons of material.” That means constant choices about where to emphasize music, where to emphasize sound design, and where to trust that silence is a more effective dramatic choice than cacophony. “There are moments where we fill the sonic space, and then we have to peel it back and make it a quieter moment,” Fehrman said. “Does it need sound design, or is it actually more tense if we left it silent? Then we have to make sure that the space really feels empty with the reverb on the dialogue and other ways to do that.”

According to Bowen, something similar often happens with the music, especially when it comes to comic moments. “There’s a lot of just getting out of the way,” Bowen said. “The last thing [Kripke] needs or wants is for us to actually comment. It’s more about getting to that comedic moment and letting the actors take it away.” Often, the laughs on the show are generated by a delicate interplay between the music and the sound design.

“Basically, we tell the joke and [the sound team] does the punchline,” Lennertz said, noting that the music will sometimes build and then stop just in time for a sound effect — or cut to silence — that lands the joke. “It’s one of those things where you almost feel guilty that it’s that simple, but it works every single time.” Lennertz added that figuring out that timing is key to the emotional moments as well.

“Eric’s very regimented in terms of when he wants the audience to feel things, and he was really holding back [on using one of Lennertz and Bowen’s most unabashedly earnest and melodic cues]. He said, ‘Not yet, not yet. This is the point where we really need to start sobbing.’ And he was right.”

The biggest challenge for many of the artisans who worked on “The Boys” was getting the job done on time and on budget while dealing with the complicated emotions the final episodes elicited. “We have to keep moving,” Fehrman said. “We have a schedule, and we want to make sure that every moment is spent making the show sound better. But I kept stopping and saying, ‘Man, this is the last episode. This is crazy.’ I’ve been on other shows for this long, but it doesn’t quite feel the same. It was a really satisfying ending for me from a viewing perspective, but it was hard to get through from a mix perspective.”

All five seasons of “The Boys” are currently streaming on Amazon Video.