Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man – Original Soundtrack
Antony Genn, Martin Slattery & Various Artists | RCA Records UK
I’ll be upfront: I love Peaky Blinders. The series, the world, the music that made it feel like nothing else on TV. That collision of post-punk and period drama that shouldn’t work and completely does. So when The Immortal Man arrived, I wanted it to be great. The film? It’s fine. Good in places, emotionally heavy in the right moments, but a little rushed toward the end and probably not quite the send-off Tommy Shelby deserved. But the soundtrack? The soundtrack is something else entirely. It’s the part of this whole project that lives up to the ambition.
Antony Genn and Martin Slattery have been here since season four, and by now they understand the Peaky sonic language better than anyone. What they’ve built for The Immortal Man is less a collection of cues and more a proper record, 36 tracks that work surprisingly well as a standalone listen, even stripped of the film entirely. The score itself is spare and claustrophobic: an old, slightly out-of-tune Campbell piano anchors much of it, all fragile and worn down, which is the right metaphor for where Tommy finds himself in 1940s Birmingham. Genn may have found the instrument gathering dust in the back of a piano shop and took it away for free. It sounds it, in the best possible way. There are moments where the strings swell and the electric guitars pile in, and it becomes something almost suffocating. The weight of war, the weight of the past, all pressing down at once.
But the real story here is Grian Chatten. The Fontaines D.C. frontman appears across a significant chunk of the album, and every time he shows up he raises the temperature. “Puppet” is the obvious entry point, dark and brooding, the kind of track that makes you want to walk in slow steps through rain. But it’s the more unexpected moments that linger. “Black Dahlia” is quietly devastating. “Opium Dreams” unsettles in a way that’s difficult to shake away. The towering “Medusa” feels like a centrepiece even on a record this dense. And his cover of Massive Attack’s “Angel” is genuinely stunning, darker and more skeletal than the original, stripped back to something rawer. When Genn called him “a thousand feet tall”, he wasn’t kidding. There’s a quality to Chatten’s voice that feels simultaneously ancestral and immediate, which makes him a near-perfect fit for this world.
The needle drops are characteristically well-chosen, and the range of them is part of what makes this record interesting. Nick Cave’s new version of “Red Right Hand” is slower, more orchestral, and feels genuinely final. Less iconic theme, more funeral march. Thirty-two years on from the original and he’s still finding new angles in it. Lankum’s “Hunting the Wren”, reimagined here with Chatten adding backing vocals to Radie Peat’s extraordinary lead, is seven minutes of something genuinely epic, the kind of folk music that sounds like it emerged from the earth rather than a studio. And then there’s Mclusky (yes, that Mclusky, back after nearly two decades) crashing in with “People Person” like a reminder that some bands were just built for specific moments. Amy Taylor’s “Nobody’s Son” operates in the same spirit, rambunctious and physical where everything else tends toward the atmospheric. Girl In The Year Above’s piano-led take on “Teardrop” is the quieter surprise, delicate where everything else leans heavy, and all the more effective for it.
If the film occasionally stumbles where the music doesn’t, that’s partly a testament to how much weight this soundtrack manages to carry. There are scenes where the score steps into the silence and does more emotional work than the surrounding dialogue, filling in gaps, bridging moments, underlining things the film doesn’t quite earn on its own. Whether that’s a flaw in the writing or a strength of the music probably depends on how you feel about Tommy Shelby. Either way, this record holds up on its terms.
Not every soundtrack earns the right to be listened to away from the thing it was made for. This one does.
