Incubus singer Brandon Boyd had an idea of what Unknown Company should sound like as soon as he saw a rough cut. The World War II thriller became his first feature film score, and he wrote it with Gregory Rogove, a friend who had worked on Boyd’s 2022 solo album Echoes & Cocoons.
Director Vincent Talenti and screenwriter Gavin Hignight set the story in the closing days of the war. A small unit of American soldiers crosses enemy lines to recover wreckage from an unidentified object. What the men find makes them question both what they’re seeing and how much they can trust each other. Ross Marquand, who played Aaron on The Walking Dead, leads the cast.
For Boyd, a longtime fan of horror and science fiction, the rough cut suggested a musical direction before he and Rogove sat down to write. “The film is creepy, beautiful and dark and we composed music that meets the film there,” he said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter. Rogove brought experience writing to picture, including music for the feature documentary Given.
Incubus fans have heard Boyd write for a specific scene before. In 2005, the band contributed “Make a Move,” “Neither of Us Can See” and “Admiration” to the soundtrack for Stealth. At the time, Boyd told Radio & Records that the tricky part was finding lyrics that belonged in the scene without spelling it out. His model was Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” in Highlander, a song he felt made the scene itself more powerful. With Unknown Company now in postproduction, Boyd and Rogove have written the music that follows the soldiers through the film.
