Phantom Thread [Original Soundtrack]

Anderson’s 2017 fable of a creatively brilliant and obsessively controlling fashion designer received one of Greenwood’s most fulfilling and beautiful scores. The centerpiece is “House of Woodcock,” an image of the designer’s seductively beautiful work built around a warm, circular piano figure that sounds like a string of pearls. Later piled with rich strings, this theme is lavish and tender, uncharacteristically so for Greenwood and Anderson, whose work often inhabits the dark underbrush of the mind. Their ability to allow all of this warmth and tenderness into their work without sacrificing any psychological complexity is the film’s main magic trick. Radiohead fans will recognize the film’s balancing act between lyrical beauty and modernist density, but Greenwood’s own distinctive take on that, especially his capacity for gentleness, especially emerges here.