Monsters Down Under is David Armsby’s latest Dinosauria film and my sixth collaboration with him. If you haven’t seen it, the film follows a Kronosaurus during the winter months of early Cretaceous Australia — a world that’s cold, wet, and genuinely strange compared to what most people picture when they think of prehistoric life.
The music for this one went in a different direction than some of the earlier scores. Something like Terrible Lizards had more organic texture to it — live instruments, warmth, a certain familiarity even in its strangeness. Monsters Down Under felt like it needed to go further out. Early Cretaceous Australia is almost alien in how different it was from the rest of the world at the time, and I wanted the score to reflect that rather than smooth it over.
So the album is mostly synthetic. Dense, slow-moving, built around textures and atmosphere more than melody. A few of the tracks have very little forward motion at all — they’re meant to sit in the environment and breathe rather than push a scene along. “A Weird Dance” took the longest to land; it went through a few versions before it found a shape that felt genuinely unsettling rather than just ambient.
David also put together a making-of video for the film that’s worth watching if you want to see his side of the process: Making of Monsters Down Under.
The full soundtrack album is available on my store: