‘The Boys’ Releases Season 2 Soundtrack as Work Begins on Season 3

The Boys, Amazon’s outrageously explicit satire of superhero culture, has achieved an uncanny feat of its own: The hourlong action-comedy-drama, whose second season finale arrives Oct. 9, has pried viewers away from the COVID-19 and election news cycle long enough to become a certifiable smash. The Hulk would be proud.

While Amazon won’t reveal exact numbers, Nielsen estimates over 6 million people streamed the show within 10 days of its July 26 debut. With a third season already in the works (plus a spinoff in development), the timing feels right for the release of some supplemental Boys materials to keep fans sated until the Supes make their return.

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To that end, a soundtrack, The Boys: Season 2 (Music from the Amazon Original Series), releases Oct. 9 on Madison Gate Records, featuring music from the show’s composer, Christopher Lennertz, plus two original songs that appeared as key plot points in season 2: “Never Truly Vanish,” a Celine Dion-esque ballad sung by Starlight (and actually performed by the actress who plays Starlight, Erin Moriarty) at the funeral of Translucent, a superhero who can make himself invisible; and “Faster,” a hip-hop song performed by Jessie T. Usher, who plays the Flash-like A-Train.

The sound Lennertz landed on for the show, with input from creator Eric Kripke (Supernatural), is meant to evoke the spirit of its antiheroes — a ragtag group of mercenaries who go up against evil, corporatized superheroes that call themselves The Seven.

“They’re aggressive, gritty and floppy,” says Lennertz. “So it ended up sounding like a garage band, with British punk meets experimental sound and noise elements to it.”

For the Supes, Lennertz began with a more traditional route by recording a full orchestra in Budapest, Hungary. He then fed the music through an audio processor to “bend the sound —  up or down depending on what’s happening in the scene. It’s a disturbing, not always pretty sound,” he says.

Looking ahead, Lennertz says writing is already finished on season 3 (he hasn’t gotten a look at the scripts yet) and that filming in Toronto, Canada, will get underway soon — under strict COVID-19 guidelines, of course, something the highly physical show has never had to deal with before. (Season 2 finished filming before the lockdown orders had gone into effect; only post-production, effects and scoring were left.)

And just as season 2 had more than a few echoes of real life scattered throughout the mayhem, so will season 3 make a nod  to the global pandemic currently gripping the planet (and sorely needing a superhero of its own).

“They seem to always take on a lot of commentary on society,” Lennertz says of the show’s writers. “I would be shocked if the issues we’re going through now weren’t commented on.”