World War Z

World War Z: Music from the Motion Picture is the score album to the 2013 film of the same name directed by Marc Forster. Featuring original score composed by Marco Beltrami, the album featuring 11-tracks were released by Warner Bros. Records on June 18, 2013. Development In December 2011, Marco Beltrami was hired to write the score for World War Z. Beltrami read the first script for the film and was blown away with the footages he saw, as it was "a unique take on the whole zombie thing. The whole notion of them being like a force of nature, and how they swarm and all that, and I thought it would have neat music applications and I just thought it would be a blast to work on." When he first saw the film, post the Philadelphia sequence, the screen cuts to black, and the Emergency Alert System's (EAS) iconic siren tone is being heard, which he felt as a fundamental harmonic structure for the score. He further used sounds from the peccary, a feral pig native to southwestern North America, to underscore the film's focus on zombie's teeth as a motif through the film, which was suggested by Tommy Lee Jones. He brought several peccary skulls and recorded and played them in collaboration with professional percussionists, where the sounds have been covered up by orchestral percussion but stands up to create tension for the film. Beltrami discussed with editor Matt Cheese about ideas on putting cues throughout the edit, and had closely worked with Paramount Music's executive producer Randy Spendlove where music editor John Finklea helped in cutting the cues and musical pieces to fix the atmosphere of the film. He felt that "one of the things, score-wise, that I thought was important was being able to have a lot of quick, off-beat, odd-metered rhythms, because that type of stuff seems to provide a real unsettling feeling in the audience when they are watching it because it’s something you have a hard time grasping on to." The score was recorded at the Abbey Road Studios in London and featured a large ensemble orchestra recording most of the pieces, along with a smaller group at British Grove Studios, where he would record some of the "chamber, intimate, gritty, rosin-on-the-bow type of stuff". Since the film has faced several setbacks during the production with rewrites and reshoots being happened, the subsequent delays led Beltrami stepping away from the project for about a year, where he could complete scoring for The Wolverine (2013).