Alex Somers - Honey Boy (Original Soundtrack) (LP)

Alex Somers writes with light, but he lets the shadows do a lot of talking. Honey Boy needed that kind of touch. The film is Shia LaBeouf’s memory box cracked open, with Alma Har’el guiding the gaze. It walks through motel rooms and movie sets and rehab halls, all carried by performances from Noah Jupe, Lucas Hedges, and LaBeouf himself. Somers slips a thread through those spaces, stitching them together with tones that feel like they’ve been living in the walls for years.

If you know Somers from Jónsi & Alex and the ambient drift of Riceboy Sleeps, the sensibility here will feel familiar, just more intimate. He favors soft-edged textures, piano that sounds like it was recorded a foot from your ear, strings that hover rather than soar, and little sparks of percussion that seem to come from someone tapping a radiator in the next room. It suits the film’s father-and-son push and pull. When Jupe’s character reaches for calm, the score gives him a small pool of stillness. When LaBeouf’s father figure flares up, the harmony wrinkles, as if heat just passed through it.

The best trick Somers pulls is restraint. A different composer might have chased catharsis in big cues. Honey Boy doesn’t want that. Somers lets melodies be brief, almost shy, and then he brings them back later with a few notes altered, like memories that changed on the way out. You can hear that in the scenes set around the shabby Los Angeles motel that serves as home. There is warmth in the harmony, but the mics pick up air and creak and the faintest hiss, so you never forget the room. That sense of place is why the music keeps working even away from the screen. Play the record without dialogue and you still get the story’s temperature.

Somers has a history with image. He has collaborated with Jónsi of Sigur Rós, produced and arranged for that circle, and scored films where quiet detail does the heavy lifting. You can hear his love of prepared and detuned colors here, like a piano with the felt worn thin, or bowed things that don’t quite announce themselves as strings until you notice the rosin in the tone. It never turns into an exercise in texture for texture’s sake. He keeps a small, recurring theme near the center and lets the timbres do the traveling.

Honey Boy is a film about performance, but it is also about the silence after you leave the stage. Somers leans into those in-between moments. After a confrontation, he will leave room for breath and then slide in a single sustained note that glows at the edges. That patience makes the rare swells land. The cues that move a little faster tend to do so with heartbeat pulses and plucked figures that skip, then hesitate, then try again. It mirrors the way the child actor in the story learns how to be a person while pretending to be one on camera.

As an album, it flows like a short story collection. There are pieces you’ll replay because they open a window right away, and others that feel like interludes until the second or third listen, when you notice how they mirror something that happened two tracks back. It runs lean, no filler, and it respects the listener. Even the briefest cue has a beginning, a point, and a gentle exit. If you’re the type who files your ambient film scores next to modern classical, this will sit comfortably between the Jónsi & Alex record and a shelf of Max Richter and Hildur Guðnadóttir.

Collectors, take note. If you’re hunting for Alex Somers vinyl, this soundtrack belongs in that conversation, and Honey Boy vinyl would make a perfect late-night spin. Alex Somers albums on vinyl tend to reward quiet rooms and good speakers, and this one is no different in spirit. If your local shop doesn’t have it, you can always buy Alex Somers records online, though I’d still keep an eye on the new arrivals bin at your favorite Melbourne record store. Browsing those bins, or even the better vinyl records Australia sites, you learn fast which scores have staying power. This one does, because it wears empathy like a tone color.

Honey Boy is a small movie with a big heartbeat, and Somers hears it clearly. He doesn’t decorate the story, he steadies it. That’s the kind of scoring you come back to years later, when the plot has faded but the feeling hasn’t. Put this on when the house is quiet and let those soft lights and long shadows carry you.