The Banshees of Inisherin

The Banshees of Inisherin (Original Score) is the score album consisting of the original score composed by Carter Burwell for the 2022 film of the same name directed by Martin McDonagh. It was released on 21 October 2022 by Hollywood Records. The album was announced with a three-track sampler debuted on the Deadline Hollywood magazine. Burwell experimented the score with approaching Colin Farrell's character through "the child-like" and "Disney character"-based music as well as fiddle-themed compositions for Brendan Gleeson's character, and non-Irish music, despite the setting in 20th century Ireland. The score received a nomination for Hollywood Music in Media Award for Best Original Score in a Feature Film, as well as Satellite Award and Golden Globe Award nomination in the "Best Original Score" category. Development McDonagh's regular collaborator Carter Burwell composed the score. Burwell recalled McDonagh did not want any Irish film music, despite mentioning that "Everything else is very Irish — the accents, the clothes, the situation, the pub. He wasn’t clear with me what he wanted to do, but it’s clear that what he didn’t want it to do was for the music to leave you in Ireland. He wanted it to take you someplace else." While focusing on Farrell's character, Pádraic, he wrote a slow-walking music consisted of celesta, harp, marimba and glockenspiel, that seemed to work "in terms of basically painting him like a man-child" and "almost like a Disney character", as those instruments are found in elementary school. He used celesta for the twinkling effect to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy", Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood theme, and John Williams' Harry Potter music. During the same time, he had read Grimms' fairy tales to his 11-year old daughter, in which while reading the Grimms' version of Cinderella, where the stepsisters mutilate their feet in order to fit in the glass slipper, Burwell felt the cutting of the limbs, almost not similar to the threat that Colm (Gleeson) makes, saying "I ended up going farther down that road of making the whole story a little bit more fairytale-like". All of the scores, mesh tonal lightness and darkness, making it easier to foreshadow the impending violence, which Burwell adds "Eight octaves down from that, there are these big heavy, low bell tones that have these strange harmonics that are a little foreboding.