Music for the Movie-Brained
· The Atlantic
Any traveler knows that a hotel gym can be the saddest place on earth. The low ceiling; the mere inches between weights and treadmills; the tiny, disintegration-ready water cups—everything conveys that you’re there to briefly repent for a salty travel diet and then get out as quickly as you can.
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But every modern traveler also knows that headphones can make the chore feel transcendent. A beat pumps, endorphins build, and maybe you throw in a round on the rowing machine just because. Suddenly, you’re inside a Lil Wayne or Bruce Springsteen song—feeling like a baller, a hero. The jail cell by the second-floor ice machine becomes a movie set, and you’re the star.
This is the experience that the then-unknown singer Sophia Stel captured last year, in her music video for “I’ll Take It,” a synth-pop track that caught buzz on TikTok and has drawn nearly 14 million Spotify plays. In the video, the 20-something Canadian wears a purple hoodie and wired earbuds to work out in a dimly lit Sheraton gym. No music-video freakiness happens—it’s not like the stationary bike turns into a Harley. But Stel just seems so blissed-out as she sweats to lyrics about being interesting and hot (“I’m tortured, you love it, you hate it / You think about me naked”). At the end, she bounds out into a beige hallway—her inner self changed, her outer world not.
The video helps explain how Stel earned the distinction of being one of the first artists signed to A24 Music. Yes, A24, as in the movie studio behind dozens of acclaimed indies, including Moonlight, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and this year’s mindbending hits Backrooms and You Can See Everything. Since launching in 2012, A24 has become so revered that its branded baseball hats are now hipster totems. In 2025, the record label that it had previously used to distribute soundtracks started to sign singers with no apparent connections to its films. The studio’s press-shy leaders have maintained mystery about their intentions, but Stel’s music, at least, fits the larger trend that A24 has helped drive: a cultural rethinking of the meaning of cinematic.
The studio funds lots of different kinds of work—action flicks, intimate comedies, topical documentaries—so it’s hard to pin down any singular A24 aesthetic. Still, film buffs like to debate the “know it when you see it” quality that unites its output. Is it the muted colors? Is it the tepid pacing? Fundamentally, those attributes serve a deeper trick: scrambling the viewers’ sense of what’s ordinary and what’s filmic. Office back rooms turn horrific; an audit bureau gets a sci-fi twist; Elizabeth Holmes’s rental house becomes suffused with Hitchcockian paranoia. A24’s films make banal settings feel uncanny through small stylistic choices—sometimes, only a music cue.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the studio has risen in an era when technology encourages people to experience their lives in movielike ways. Decades ago, the Walkman and then the iPod gave consumers the ability to replace the noise of commutes and chores with more satisfying soundtracks. Streaming and smartphones then supercharged that practice—and gave movie scores a second life as sources of on-the-go vibes (to use a term synonymous with A24). Phone cameras and video-sharing platforms have further pushed people to see life through the lens of entertainment. The idea that we’re all performers was once a theory of postmodern scholars; now it’s taken for granted in rap lyrics (Lil Nas X: “My life is a movie”) and TikTok slang (“main-character energy”).
The result is that cinematic, as a descriptor, now connotes not a break from regular life but an enhancement of it. Once, the term would have conjured the symphonic grandeur of a John Williams score—or at least the alien soundscapes of Tangerine Dream. Film-obsessed popular musicians made concept albums that insisted on their own importance, such as the Who’s Tommy. But a lot of today’s movie-influenced music is happy to simmer in the background. The Tim Burton–inspired whispers of Billie Eilish, the spaghetti-Western bustle of Khruangbin, or the folktronica of the A24-signed Ear cast an intriguing mood without necessarily demanding intense attention. (Which is not to say those musicians don’t reward close listening.)
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Stel makes blurry, nocturnal pop that comports with this approach: “In general, my music tends to be soundtrack-like,” she told Office magazine. “To me it’s meant to be listened to on your walk home with headphones in.” But at the same time, it’s about that sort of listening. She was raised as one of 11 kids in a strictly religious family; the radio was mostly banned. In late adolescence, she discovered Drake, Future, and Rihanna: artists whose songs about holding court in crowded nightclubs was, to a historically unprecedented extent, enjoyed through earbuds.
The title of her debut album, the greatest album of all time—released by A24 earlier this month—is like a joke about being an ordinary mortal who uses music to feel extraordinary. Working on her laptop to arrange sparse but anthemic songs, Stel gravitates toward crunchy synth textures that feel cheap and handmade. She sings in an Auto-Tuned mumble that seems to indicate an indifference to being understood, but her melodies and riffs frequently evoke the blustering trap, EDM, and pop of the 2010s. Her lyrics swerve back and forth between burned-out sadness and confident head rushes enabled by drugs or sex (“Saying stupid things like ‘I’m the chosen one’”). Her songs are about chasing a climax and not caring if it’s artificial, and the fun of listening to her lies in the way that glum monotony inevitably gives way to a zooming high.
She’s not the only musician making meta-cinematic work lately. As I wrote a couple of months ago, Slayyyter and Tinashe are drawing hype with disappointment-tinged pop about the ever-widening gap between Hollywood’s vision of the American dream and the distracted, disconnected culture in which it exists. The ascendent Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. just released a seductive, nightmarish album, Dopamine Chamber, that’s inspired by the feeling of living inside a screen. To get in the proper headspace to write, the front man, Grian Chatten, went to a theater and sat through most of a movie while listening to music in his headphones. “The sense of isolation from that was unreal,” he told The New York Times.
That experience may sound extreme—but there’s a reason the subject of derealization is culturally pervasive right now, whether the example is Stel’s Lynchian party anthems or the trippy layers of You Can See Everything. As we flick between amusements on our phones and experiences in the real world, figuring out which sensations and memories are authentically our own becomes difficult. Art and media can help lend us a sense of meaning and narrative, but to really script our own story, we need to take off the headphones from time to time.