There are moments in film where the score does not accompany the image. It becomes the image. Holocaust Honey, the sixth track on Daniel Lopatin's score for Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme, is that kind of moment.
Two minutes and fifty-seven seconds. Electronic arpeggios layered with organ and strings. An arrangement inspired by the work of Constance Demby, the New Age composer whose baroque sensibility Lopatin channels through his own fractured, synthetic lens. It sounds like something between Wendy Carlos and a cathedral collapsing in slow motion.
The scene it scores is one of the most debated sequences in recent cinema. A flashback depicting Marty's rival Bela Kletzki as a prisoner at Auschwitz, sent on a bomb disposal mission, returning with honey smeared across his body from a beehive he found. Fellow inmates lick the honey from his skin. Survival as communion. The sequence is drawn from a real anecdote in Marty Reisman's autobiography.
Lopatin's music does not sentimentalize the scene. It does not tell you how to feel. It holds the moment in suspension, somewhere between horror and grace, and lets you sit with the impossibility of both.
The Score as a Whole
Lopatin deliberately rejected period-accurate 1950s music for Marty Supreme. Instead, he built an anachronistic soundscape around the concept of imagining the protagonist at a Tears for Fears concert in 1984. The twenty-three-track score blends neoclassical orchestration with 1980s synth work and tactile analog hardware. Laraaji contributed ambient textures. Weyes Blood provided vocal layers.
Within the score's musical language, strings represent Kay while the arpeggio motif represents Marty. The two voices intertwine, separate, and collide across the film's runtime.
The result was the first film score to receive a Best New Music designation from Pitchfork. It was nominated for Critics Choice and widely expected to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score. It did not, in one of the more conspicuous omissions of the awards season.
Lopatin and the Safdies
This is their third collaboration. Good Time in 2017 won the Soundtrack Award at Cannes. Uncut Gems in 2019 combined electronic tension with grandiose choirs. Marty Supreme represents the most ambitious and emotionally varied of the three, a score that moves from competitive ferocity to intimate devastation within the span of a few tracks.
Marty Supreme grossed approximately 179 million dollars worldwide, making it A24's highest-grossing film. Chalamet won Best Actor at the Golden Globes. The film received nine Oscar nominations. But the score, quietly and persistently, may be the element that endures longest.
Lopatin's Place in Contemporary Composition
Daniel Lopatin, who records and releases albums as Oneohtwosa, has spent his career occupying a productive tension between experimental electronic music and accessible emotional expression. His solo work operates in deconstructed territory that rewards patience and tolerance for dissonance. His film scoring work, by contrast, channels those same instincts into the service of narrative, using anachronism and sonic fragmentation to say things about a story that conventional scoring would flatten.
The result is a body of work that has influenced an entire generation of electronic composers who take cinematic work seriously. The idea that a film score can be anachronistic as a deliberate compositional choice, not a failure of period research, has opened creative space that composers across the industry have moved into. Holocaust Honey could not exist in a score that was trying to sound like 1950s New York. It exists because Lopatin was trying to sound like the emotional truth of the moment, which is a different and more demanding assignment.
Why This Particular Track
Among twenty-three tracks, Holocaust Honey stands apart because it is where the score's competing impulses, the baroque, the electronic, the unbearably human, achieve something like resolution. The arpeggio that represents Marty throughout the score transforms in this track into something that no longer sounds like competitive drive. It sounds like witness.
For listeners drawn to the intersection of electronic composition and emotional extremity, the full Marty Supreme score is the most important work in this territory since Ennio Morricone was using synthesizers to score spaghetti westerns. The connection sounds improbable until you hear it, and then it seems obvious. Both composers understood that anachronism is not a mistake. It is a statement about how the past actually feels from the inside.
Lopatin's concurrent solo releases, including Tranquilizer, share compositional DNA with the score, and following the through-line between them reveals an artist at the height of his powers, producing work across multiple contexts that adds up to something coherent and irreplaceable. You can find similar boundary-crossing between music and visual art in work like MoMA PS1's Warm Up series, where the question of what electronic music can do when placed in proximity to art has been asked persistently and productively.
If You Loved This
Lopatin's earlier scores for Good Time and Uncut Gems share DNA with Marty Supreme. His studio album Age Of explores similar baroque-electronic territory. His concurrent album Tranquilizer features sweeping movements and surreal instrumentation. For those drawn to the atmospheric end of electronic composition, the Lopatin catalog is essential.
Listen to Holocaust Honey on Spotify | Listen to the full Marty Supreme soundtrack
The Endurance of the Work
Holocaust Honey has been listened to independently of the film thousands of times by listeners who have never seen Marty Supreme, which is unusual for a film cue and says something significant about its autonomous power as a piece of music. Lopatin constructed a piece of film music that functions as concert music, which is not a contradiction but a high standard. The score was always meant to endure, and this particular track, with its three minutes of suspended impossibility, will endure longer than most.
