How do you score a radioactive, mop-wielding monster vigilante? For composing duo Brooke and Will Blair, the answer is: with absolutely everything you've got.
Longtime collaborators of director Jeremy Saulnier, for whom they scored last year's acclaimed Rebel Ridge, the brothers faced a uniquely chaotic challenge with The Toxic Avenger, a gonzo remake of the 1984 Troma cult classic.
To match the film's anarchic energy, they crafted a brilliantly eclectic score that smashes together heavy metal, synth-pop, punk, jazz, and even bossa nova, creating a sonic landscape as wonderfully unhinged as its hero.
Let's dive in.
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NFS: Hey, Brooke and Will! The Toxic Avenger was directed by your older brother, Macon Blair. What was the collaborative dynamic like amongst the three of you on this film?
Will Blair: Well, Brooke and I are used to working together scoring movies, and we’ve been collaborating since we were kids, generally. But, it’s a rare treat to get all 3 of us on the same project, so I think I’m speaking for all of us when I say it was definitely an exciting one for us! We first fell in love with movies, and with just making stuff, through Macon. Macon was making flip books, comic books, and short Super 8 films with his buddies in the neighborhood. He modeled for us what the creative process looks like as kids, and it turns out it’s messy!
Brooke Blair: The great thing about working with Macon on films is that we’ve already got a built-in shared language and set of reference points. We usually have a good idea about what he’s trying to get across or accomplish. He understands us so well as musicians and knows which directions he can point us in. He also knows how to push us into new territory and challenge us.
He’ll reference several different musical approaches, instrumentation, sounds, and styles, and trust us to understand it all and synthesize it into something that can work for the film. He did that with I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore, and took the same approach on Toxie and cranked it up to 11.
His approach to the scores for his films is very much like the mixtapes he made when we were younger. They’d be all over the place stylistically, but still make sense as a whole. We always know that’s going to be the mindset for collaborating together. We’re going to have huge strings, brass, metal guitar, spaghetti western influences, doo wop, etc. Stylistically, we’re going to swing from big action orchestral superhero cues to rap rock, to bossa nova, to heartfelt somber Julee Cruise sorts of tunes. He kept us on our toes!
Elijah Wood in 'The Toxic Avenger'Credit: Troma Entertainment, Inc.
NFS: What kind of inspiration did you take from Lloyd Kaufman's 1984 original? Did you have a preexisting relationship with the film or any other Troma releases?
WB: It was one of the earliest VHS movies Macon shared with us as kids, and we were immediately in love with the sheer chaos and messiness of it all. Both the movie itself and the filmmaking. It felt like Lloyd and co. were intentionally pulling back the curtain a bit and showing us how the movie got made. Like: “That was a watermelon they ran over and made it sort of look like the kid’s head!” It fit right in with other things like Meet the Feebles and Monty Python and movies that, as kids, just felt insane. We loved it. And it was so tangible and approachable and “practical” in all of its low-budget charm. It felt like: “wait, maybe making movies (and art in general) doesn’t have to be expensive, maybe WE can make movies like this!”
NFS: In addition to an orchestral score, the film features several original songs. Do you have a favorite track from the film?
BB: “The Good Things”, by our fictitious group The Whoopsie Dews, is a pretty special one. We wrote the song with Macon, so it was the three of us collaborating on an original doo wop tune, a musical genre that all three of us really love. It was a nice opportunity to balance all the intensity and chaos of the score with something so simple, beautiful, and positive.
The tune features some amazing musicians: Vaughn Faison on lead vocals, Rachel Burns, Jerrica White, and Emily Robb on background vocals, Vince Tampio on horns, as well as the incredible 16-piece Medirecon String Ensemble based in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Macon encouraged us to really lean into making the song as era-specific and authentic as possible, so it might feel like a legitimate long-forgotten B-side from an obscure doo wop group from the ’50s. We used a lot of old ribbon mics, tape, and vinyl emulations, and mixed in a way that would have been similar to how it was done in the '50s and '60s. We completely nerded out on this one! We even heard from Macon that a few folks on the post-production side of things thought this was a legitimate needle drop from an obscure group, so mission accomplished!
NFS: How does your songwriting approach differ when adopting the voice of a fictional band like the in-universe Killer Nutz?
WB: We get to be actors. We got to pretend. The marching orders from Macon were: “the Nutz are essentially a major-label act, so it’s gotta sound good, they’re not un-talented, but they are the worst humans ever and nothing about them or their music is actually likeable."
With that said, we were '80s kids, which meant '90s teens, so we got our fair share of rap-rock acts back then, and we definitely learned how to play those riffs, and you better believe we would rap. Macon would, too, perhaps embarrassingly so.
So in some ways, the Nutz songs came to us quicker and easier than anything else on the score. Haha.
Brooke and Will Blair (otherwise known as The Blair Brothers)Credit: Matt Stanley
NFS: Were there any particularly challenging moments during your creative process on The Toxic Avenger?
BB: The sheer amount of minutes of music, the variety of musical styles, the production-specific original songs, and the number of musicians involved in making the score/soundtrack made this a huge lift overall. I will say that the biggest challenge was shifting from our demo phase into what the score actually became. We started early with the idea that the score would be a “scrappy” nod to 70s crime or detective scores, very David Shire-esque. The early demos had minimal percussion, timpanis, bass, and a few horns here and there.
We ended up in a much different creative place as soon as we started seeing some rough edits taking shape. We quickly realized the score was going to need to be a much bigger, orchestral approach, which leaned into more of a superhero sound. It would still need to have all the messiness, chaos, and silliness mixed in, but with a much fuller, more vibrant, and colorful sound and instrumentation.
We used a 60-piece orchestra (The Prague Philharmonic), huge rock drums, wild synthesizers, 80s metal guitar, a choir, whistling, screamo vocals, farts, burps, and bombastic found percussion consisting of “toxic” oil drums, anvils, and metal objects. We threw the kitchen sink, fridge, and pantry at it. Macon kept asking for “more, more, more!” There were well over 100 musicians in 8 countries involved in the recording of the score.
NFS: Considering your own background as musicians, not to mention your work on Jeremy Saulnier's Green Room, the metal/punk elements of The Toxic Avenger make a lot of sense. What kind of relationship do you have with these genres, and how did you work to authentically incorporate them into the film's score?
BB: We grew up in the '80s and '90s, so of course we were exposed to a good amount of hair metal as youngsters. We would borrow The Clash, Bad Brains, Suicidal Tendencies, and Social Distortion tapes from Macon’s room growing up. In elementary school and junior high, I was learning Metallica songs and Dr. Know guitar solos while Will’s band was covering Danzig and Clutch. As young musicians, we explored just about everything.
For Toxie, we knew there would be elements of rock and metal in the score, and especially the original tunes. We were able to pull from those early years of learning that sort of stuff. I tried my best at some Eddie Van Halen/Dr. Know guitar karate and Will definitely brought in a heavier approach to the drums, both in the orchestral score and of course the Killer Nutz tunes. We also enlisted the help of guitarist Damien Paris of the NY-based band, The Giraffes. Damien is an amazing hard rock guitar wizard, so he’s all over the score as well.
Peter Dinklage in 'The Toxic Avenger'Credit: Troma Entertainment, Inc.
NFS: Are there any other notable musicians or collaborators who contributed to The Toxic Avenger soundtrack?
WB: We’d like to extend an additional round of applause to singer Vaughn Faison, the lead vocalists of The Whoopsie Dews, whose performance of “The Good Things” has become a standout moment in the soundtrack for us, and for Macon, who placed the song in 3 different moments in the film. Vaughn was initially hired to demo the song. It was supposed to be a placeholder take from a talented young vocalist and there was talk of finding a big name to record the final take. As soon as Vaughn delivered his self-recorded first take, it was an immediate and unanimous decision: this is not a demo, this is the final take. He brought the perfect amount of sincere tender-heartedness and authentic, old-timey charm to the song – and with that, The Whoopsie Dews lineup was complete.
And we’d also like to offer a huge thank you to Medirecon, the Ukraine-based 16-piece string ensemble that we connected with in late 2021. We assigned to them about 12 minutes of score to perform and record – some of the quieter and tender scenes in the movie. By the time this brave group of musicians hit record in their Kyiv recording studio – in early ‘22 – Russian forces had disabled the city’s power grid, so they powered the recordings by generator and performed their parts by candlelight. The studio temperature dropped below 30 degrees Fahrenheit, and they generously offered to re-record any parts if the intonation was compromised by the temperature. But they delivered pristinely performed and recorded parts, under impossible circumstances, and we’ve been lucky enough to get to work with them a few times since.
NFS: The album is also getting a physical release on vinyl! What does it mean to you as musicians to have your work available in such a format?
BB: Having a physical release of anything will always be a huge treat. As kids, we saved up lawnmowing and babysitting money in order to go into a legitimate studio and record an album with our respective bands. Having an actual printed cassette tape in our hands after that process was nothing short of magical. Later on, in our careers as musicians, having a CD printed was still just as exciting, so having the occasional score pressed on vinyl brings up those same feelings from our early days playing music.
Having a vinyl release of The Toxic Avenger is so insanely exciting for us, especially since it’s such a close collaboration with Macon. It’s so cool to be able to hold this physical thing that the three of us made together…it sounds amazing, it looks amazing…and it’ll last. While it’s always exciting to have music released on streaming services, having something you can hold and play on a turntable still feels like “how it should be done.” The excitement of that never wears off.
NFS: You also scored Saulnier's Rebel Ridge, which became a smash hit in 2024 and is currently nominated for several Emmys. What was it like to see your work gain such immense popularity on Netflix?
BB: It’s always an extra bonus when a project we work on is received well. We work on so many projects that we’re really proud of and give our all to the score and to helping tell the story. Unfortunately, a lot of things fly beneath the radar when there’s so much content and various streaming services out there. It’s also so hard to tell which ones will resonate with larger audiences.
We had a feeling Rebel Ridge was special, and folks seem to embrace it and recommend it to friends in a really organic way online. Everyone loves a David and Goliath story, and this was such an original take on that.
To be honest, the way that Rebel Ridge was received was so important to us, and to Jeremy as a filmmaker. His previous film, Hold The Dark, had a hot/cold reaction, and that’s one that we’re super proud of, and I’m still sort of confused by the reaction to the film, because we love it. So it was really nice for Jeremy to be “back on top” after what felt like a little dip.
He’s such a hardworking filmmaker, and he definitely expects a lot from us. He pushes us to be the best version of ourselves that we can be on each film we collaborate on. We’ve learned so much about filmmaking and what directors want from composers working with him. Jeremy’s films always feel like bright spots in our careers.
NFS: Is there anything else you would like to add about The Toxic Avenger or your careers at large?
WB: We’d like to thank Macon for not only trusting us with the biggest score of our career and the biggest creative juggling act we’ve ever tried to pull off, but also for asking everything of us that he did. At one point, we thought he was pranking us with the sheer amount of genres and styles he was hoping to hear in the score and the songs. He wanted us to find ways to include literally everything. We weren’t sure how to pull it all off, but like any good older brother, he pushed us to dig deep and make it happen. Thank you, Macon! Hope it works for you!
