VIA PRESS RELEASE | Varèse Sarabande announces new expanded CD and digital editions, plus the first-ever vinyl release, of the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack to Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City. The soundtrack album features music by Rodriguez, John Debney, and Graeme Revell, who respectively scored the three different chapters to this big-screen adaptation of Miller’s comic.
Available for pre-order now, the vinyl release featuring the original soundtrack for the film will arrive on March 27th as a widely available “Blood Red” translucent pressing, joined by exclusive limited-edition color variants from Barnes & Noble, Mondo, and Enjoy the Ride. A Deluxe Edition expanded version of the film score featuring the complete original score cues by Rodriguez, Revell, and Debney paired with brand-new liner notes will arrive on CD as part of Varèse Sarabande’s beloved CD Club series and make its streaming premiere on April 24th.
An iconic meeting of acclaimed visual stylist Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns, Ronin, 300) and hit cinematic one-man band Robert Rodriguez (Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Machete, Alita: Battle Angel). 2005’s Sin City took adaptations of the graphic medium to the next level with a beyond faithful, blazingly black-and-white film noir portrait of doomed detectives, femme fatales, and sordid villains that gave true, all-star life to Miller’s iconically hard-boiled characters.
“Sin City’s visuals are as important as the story. That’s what you fall in love with. This would be the first time you’d see Frank Miller’s art move, and that’s what I pitched to him,” Rodriguez says of their breakthrough co-directing effort, joined by special guest director Quentin Tarantino.
Rodriguez and Miller created a timeless, beautifully sordid cesspool where rock and roll could co-exist with pulsating synths, seething guitars, erotic Spanish percussion, and a lush symphony, all dancing and shooting it out to Rodriguez’s atmospheric melodies and expressionism. “What I loved about Sin City was that its noir is post-modern and punk rock. I thought the sound needed to take chances like that too,” he remarks.
Translating three main Sin City stories—“The Hard Goodbye,” “The Big Fat Kill,” and “That Yellow Bastard”—into an interweaving anthology film, Rodriguez knew the high-pressure musical deadline wouldn’t be met by himself alone. His solution was to bring in past composing collaborators Graeme Revell of From Dusk Till Dawn and John Debney from Spy Kids. Given two weeks each, Revell took on “The Hard Goodbye” as Debney scored “The Big Fat Kill.”
Each composer was walled off from hearing the other’s work. Yet the result was a surprisingly cohesive score, with each segment still reflecting their respective voices—from Rodriguez’s rockabilly grind to Revell’s expressionism and Debney’s lush orchestrations. “Robert really wanted this to be uncolored and unfinished, which is where Graeme and I came in,” Debney says. “That we’re in black and white so much of the time, and then there’s splashes of red, yellow, and white, was visually musical. It’s that look that dictated what came out of our souls. At first, I wondered how this was all going to work. In hindsight, that was the brilliance of Robert, because he wanted individual ideas. What came out was just spectacular.”
A box-office smash that redefined the way that Hollywood could boldly capture the energy and rhythm of graphic adaptations, the scoring of Sin City is now unleashed like never before on a two-CD presentation by Varèse Sarabande Records, as supervised by Rodriguez. The first disc collects the original score as heard in Varèse’s initial 2005 release.
The second CD presents a remastered, complete presentation of the original score cues by Rodriguez, Revell, and Debney that expands the atmosphere-drenched, grittily evocative soundscape of the directors’ modern noir classic. New liner notes feature exclusive interviews with the director and composers on the unique creative process that resulted in a blazingly distinctive noir soundtrack.
“Sin City remains one of my favorite scores because I’ve always wanted to do something film noir,” Rodriguez says. “It was a game-changer because it had geek-centric DNA. No film noir had an opening like this because Sin City had a comic culture behind it. We were being faithful to something that was visually striking in a medium that few other people were using.”
