For the last 50 years, The Beatles have been the only band to be nominated for scoring at the Academy Awards.
Then Son Lux came along.
The American trio are the brains behind almost all of the music you hear in Everything Everywhere All At Once, the mind-bending, multiverse movie that has picked up 11 Oscar nominations for everything from Best Director to Best Actress to Son Lux's nomination: Best Original Score.
For the first time in more than five decades, film's most influential awards body is taking notice of the richness that mainstream bands can bring to the landscape.
We just really love the band
Ask any Son Lux fan to describe the band's sound and a word that will inevitably come up is "cinematic".
Comprised of lead vocalist Ryan Lott, percussionist Ian Chang and guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, Son Lux has toured eight albums around the globe but have always had one foot firmly in the world of film.
From contributing songs to the soundtracks such as The Hunger Games: Mockingbird to Lott creating the entire score for Paper Towns, the outfit's work carries an addictive air of controlled chaos.
It's almost impossible to predict where Lott's next vocal note or Chang's next kick drum will land, but the result inevitably ends up polished brightly.
The sonic combination proved irresistible for Everything Everywhere All At Once directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as the Daniels.
Son Lux were some of the first collaborators to jump on board the Daniels' ship, signing on back in 2019 when the film was still just a script.
Over the coming three years the band would craft almost 100 bespoke pieces of music that would accompany the on-screen action — while also working on their trilogy of albums, Tomorrows I-III.
All this work was being done electronically: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the band only were able to meet up just once in person during the whole process.
However, weekly Zoom meetings with the Daniels gave them details about the intricate vision for the film, while also allowing room for the band's trademark sound.
"I think that's the mark of truly gifted directors: to both empower and propel their formed family yet get exactly out of the film what they want. That is the magic of the film," Lott says.
And they more than left their mark on the score, according to Chang.
"They wrote the lyrics for the hot dog hands musical and the one scene when it's planet of the apes, that's just Daniel Kwan playing trumpet really badly, kind of layered on top of himself," Chang laughs.
"I think the world of film scoring there's a wall between, 'Oh, these are film composers, and these are artists who make music'. It's so separate but Daniels definitely try to think of it less in that way."
It was the Daniels, says Lott and Chang, that were among the band's greatest supporters in approaching the project as a team.
"The Daniels reached out to us, as a band, wanting us to score the movie, as a band. They reached out to us, as a band, because they were fans of the music," Chang says.
"It's very natural for them, because they come from musical directing, but they themselves are also a band, they're an inseparable team and they recognise the value that each brings. The whole is what makes it work," Lott agrees.
The Daniels originally got their start directing music videos, most notably for Snake Hips and Lil Jon's 2013 hit Turn Down For What, an introduction to the pair's eclectic style they would eventually carry over into Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Now we're cookin'
The jewel in Son Lux's crown of a soundtrack is it's lead single and end credit song, This Is A Life, featuring Mitski and Talking Head's David Bryne.
It has also secured an Oscars nomination for Best Original Song and will be performed, live, during the ceremony.
"David wrote his part entirely and also formed the real direction and intention for the song. He came with a strong formed idea of it being a tender, emotional ending to the movie," Lott says.
"He is just so not precious about his ideas and generous in presenting them. He's just great to work with."
However, hidden on the soundtrack are a few other impressive cameos, such as Now We're Cooking, a heart-warmingly sincere riff designed to act as a theme song for the film's bizarre Ratatouille spin-off.
Recorded in a painfully accurate recreation of the Pixar sound, what elevates this song above parody is that it actually features legendary musical artist and Disney composer Randy Newman.
"That was surreal. It was a song that they had warned us that was going to have to be written very early on," Lott recounts.
"The task at hand was to write a song, in the style of Randy Newman, for Randy Newman. That was one of those [that] I just kept pushing it off, but then, all of a sudden, Randy was a thumbs-up. They sent him a screener and he was, like, 'Yep, just tell me what to do'."
How to make hot dog fingers emotional
To watch Everything Everywhere All At Once is somewhat akin to going on a rollercoaster in the dark.
You think you know where you're going then, all of a sudden, you're ripped to another fantastical world where the rules don't align with yours.
With a narrative that's so overwhelming at times, Son Lux had the important job of letting the audience know whether they should laugh or cry when, for example, the protagonist suddenly has frankfurts for fingers.
"One of my favourite things about scoring is that you have options. There are always decisions to make with every gesture, or micro expression you can choose to play with that, or cast," Lott says.
"You can make something feel different, you sense the power of music in the process because you can feel it change as you make different decisions. Or you can erase it and take it in a totally different direction."
Chang agrees: "Perspective is also so important, because are we in the actor on screens' head or [in] the audience's head? Who's experiencing this right now and how do we tailor the music to that."
A shift in universes
While pop musicians such as Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Arcade Fire's Win Butler have been nominated, and even won, scoring awards in the past, it hasn't been under their artists' names.
For, Lott the band's nomination represents a hopeful change of perspective within the film-scoring community.
"Because there are so many codified practices and traditions with how you score a movie, there hasn't, historically, been a welcome opportunity to engage as a scoring team for bands," Lott told ABC News.
"There's a sense with film music composing that there's this 'auteurship' lens, where it's like that score was done by this man and this man," Chang agrees.
"I feel like it used to be people in bands do songs and people who score films do that, but I feel like there's more and more people that are, like, 'Wait, I can do both'."
In a different life …
Regardless if Son Lux picks up the statuette on Oscars night, Lott hopes the band's nomination opens the door for more musical acts in film scoring.
"I think that would result in more fun surprises and different ways of telling a story, because there's definitely a codified way of telling a story through music and I think there's still so much to explore," Lott says.
However, for right now, the band says they're just happy to have played a part in a film that has touched so many people.
"We've seen people with the googly eye on their foreheads at shows and people on social media were asking if we were going to play music from the score," Chang says.
"I'm very thankful I am the person I am in this particular universe, because this movie might not have been possible in another one," Lott says.
Nomination indicates a 'maturing' for the category
Composer and Swinburne University film music academic Dan Golding agrees that pop, rock and jazz musicians have played a huge part in film music history.
"Everyone from [Radiohead's] Johnny Greenwood all the way to Hans Zimmer. If you look at The Buggles' Video Killed The Radio Star film clip, he's hanging up the back on synthesisers," Mr Goulding told ABC News.
"There have been bands credited with film scores in the past, like Toto did the soundtrack for the original Dune, even in the 1970s there was Goblin, who did Susperia."
However, there's a reason you haven't seen these artists on an Oscars stage.
"Part of that discussion is that the academy doesn't like multiple composers being nominated," Mr Golding said.
"So, to have a band as the band nominated is kind of great and, hopefully, there's a maturing in the way we understand how soundtracks work."
Mr Golding isn't surprised at Son Lux's historic nomination for their contribution to the film.
"For something like Everything Everywhere All At Once, it is such a narratively complicated movie that the music has to do that anchoring work of holding down the emotion of each scene, perhaps a little more strongly than otherwise, [because] it's almost like a shortcut. It allows the viewer to be prepared for what they're about to see," he says.
"Everything Everywhere All At Once does it so well and so consistently, it's such a key component."
