Andor does so much, so well, in a way that it makes itself feel unlike any other piece of Star Wars while also being the Star Wars-iest thing around. Its music is just one highlight of that, and this week the show gave us a hypnotic beat that we can’t get out of our heads — and now, we don’t have to.
That beat, the grimy club music that blares across the soundscape during the climax of this week’s episode, “Announcement,” is called “Niamos! (Morlana Club Mix),” named for the sunny beach planet Cassian whisks himself away to in the wake of the heist on Aldhani. It’s also, blessedly, in today’s release of Volume 1 of the Andor soundtrack from Nicholas Britell, which otherwise includes music from the first four episodes of the season.
It’s all very good — Britell has carved a sound for Andor so far that feels Star Wars when it needs to be, but very different from the oeuvres of John Williams or the Star Wars streaming contemporaries like Ludwig Goransson or Natalie Holt. “Niamos!” is perhaps the apex of that idea. Usually, when Star Wars gives us club music, it’s a riff on the smooth Jizz of Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes — the same brassy, vaguely spacey faux-jazz that we first heard back in A New Hope — because that’s what we’re trained to expect of every cantina in the galaxy far, far away.
“Niamos!” sounds nothing like that. It’s a dark, almost oppressive repetitive beat that drills its way inside your head, both befitting the first moment it blares into Andor’s soundscape when we arrive on the planet the track’s named for, and then again when it plays over the credits of “Announcement” given the dire straits we leave Cassian in at its climax. It wouldn’t be out of place in our own world, but still feels distanced enough to be a part of the world of Star Wars. In a way, it’s reflective of Andor at large — this grounded, grimy look at the realities of its worldbuilding that roots a realistic, human view of the Empire’s rise that feels like a mirror to our current moment.
Also, it’s just a good beat.
The first volume of Andor’s soundtrack is now streaming on Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer.
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