Former Yuck frontman Daniel Blumberg wins Best Original Score for ‘The Brutalist’ at 2025 Oscars
Former Yuck frontman Daniel Blumberg won Best Original Score for The Brutalist at the 2025 Oscars last night (March 2).
Off the back of a recent Bafta win for the score, the composer won his first Oscar yesterday for his efforts soundtracking the sprawling drama, which charts the life of fictitious Hungarian architect, László Tóth – a role that also won Adrien Brody the Academy Award for Best Actor – who moves to the US after surviving the Holocaust.
Blumberg’s work was nominated alongside the scores for Conclave, Emilia Pérez, Wicked and The Wild Robot, and gave a glowing description of his creative relationship with director Brady Corbet, who enlisted him to score his third film after Scott Walker had worked on the first two.
“I’ve been an artist for 20 years, since I was a teenager,” he said, “and when I met Brady, I met my artistic soulmate.” He went on to thank the “hard-working, radical musicians” who helped perform his score for the film.
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NME’s five-star-review of The Brutalist noted “Blumberg’s jagged steam-roller of a score”, which employed jazz infused piano, sax and towering percussion to convey Tóth’s mounting despair.
Earlier this year, the musician told Pitchfork that when the film was in post-production, he and the sound team would have screenings with Corbet, and he ran into a problem where every time he watched the film, he cried at the end. “The first time it happened, I just ran out the room,” he recalled. “I just remember standing in the toilet of this post-production studio just crying with Brady.”
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Prior to working on The Brutalist, Blumberg played in indie rock outfit Yuck, and left the band back in 2013 to focus on solo projects, going on to release ‘Unreal‘ the same year. Some years later in 2021, Yuck announced that they were disbanding.
Blumberg is set to score the upcoming Amanda Seyfried-starring Ann Lee, which was co-written by Corbet and directed by his partner Mona Fastvold.