4 Songs From The Backrooms

In joyful anticipation of Kane Parsons' new A24 movie

Everyone’s talking about Backrooms. All of my U.S. friends are raving about it.

The new A24 sci-fi/horror smash hasn’t yet been released in theaters over here – it will premiere next week in Germany – but as a fan of Kane Parsons’ YouTube series and a lover of creepypasta lore and liminal spaces vibes in general, I’m really looking forward to finally seeing it soon.

At just 20 years of age, the director Kane Parsons seems like a pretty cool and sane person to me. Just as an example, in a recent interview for Deadline, he’s been quite outspoken about the harmfulness of generative AI to human creativity:

“We already live in a world where you walk outside and there are billboards and signs that are obvious AI slop. That’s become part of our visual reality. To me, generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.”

Looking at the film music credits for Backrooms, most of it was apparently written by Parsons himself with the help of a Canadian composer named Edo Van Breemen and another composer/producer called Jeffrey Innes.

It’s not a huge surprise – Parsons has always been involved with composing his own film music, even for the YouTube shorts, and he’s previously even released a bunch of albums with the music to his Backrooms web TV series.

For some scenes in the Backrooms film, Parsons and his co-writers have apparently used these forgotten 1960s crooner lounge tunes, which they might have obtained from some rare APM library music compilations. They also used the Spanish holiday standard “Feliz Navidad”, a short track from Klaus Doldinger’s soundtrack to the 1984 fantasy film The Never-Ending Story, and those “Greetings in 55 Languages” that NASA put on the Golden Records for Voyager 1, designed as a message from human civilization to alien lifeforms.

Judging from the song lists circulating online, there are some original tunes used in the film as well. I’ve been playing these four songs below on repeat in anticipation, and I’m curious to find out how they’ve been used in the movie.

01

The Payolas – Eyes Of A Stranger (1982)

This is the biggest hit that the Canadian new wave band The Payolas ever had, first released on their album No Stranger to Danger. A brilliant early 1980s deep cut with some serious reggae influence in that off-beat guitar. It feels pop-leaning but weirdly experimental at the same time, somewhere halfway between dubby The Clash/PIL songs and a Duran Duran B-side from the Rio era.

The song appeared on the Valley Girl soundtrack in 1983; the teen comedy in the vein of The Breakfast Club or Pretty in Pink is sort of a cult movie in the hauntology/vaporwave scene. It was also used some years later in a Miami Vice episode from Season 4 (1987/88). It feels highly likely that Parsons discovered the song through one of these syncs. In any case, it’s a bop. Are young people actually still saying that? Seriously though, it’s a strong tune from one of my favorite eras in pop history.

02

Who’s Who – Ulterior Motives (1986/2024)

A 17-second clip of this strange, unknown synth pop song first appeared online in 2021, allegedly found by a Spanish user in an old DVD backup archive. To the Lostwave online community, which revolves around identifying forgotten songs from the past, it was only known as “Everyone Knows That” – tentatively named after a prominent line in the chorus. It took three years until someone from that community found the full song in a p0rn movie from 1986, Angels of Passion.

Turns out the tune was written by British-Canadian twin brothers and musicians Christopher Saint and Philip Adrian Booth. Also turns out the line being sung is actually “Everyone Knows It.” Even the Booth brothers didn’t have the tracks from the original recordings anymore though, so they reacted to the online hype in 2024 by re-recording and re-releasing the song on an album under the name Who’s Who.

What’s interesting is that the brothers are also filmmakers – they’ve made documentaries on supernatural topics like haunted houses, ghosts and exorcisms, as well as fictional horror movies. It’s not surprising that Kane Parsons included this song, considering the strong thematic overlaps with his own work which is rooted in internet lore, creepypasta, hauntology and lost media. Definitely a beautiful Easter egg for all the Lostwave nerds on Reddit.

03

The Caretaker – All That Follows Is True (2016)

The English electronic musician James Leyland Kirby created some of his most lauded albums by slowing down and manipulating samples of ballroom big band music, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s, which he’d found on old shellac records from the flea market.

Like William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops (2002) and the music of Burial or Boards Of Canada, Kirby’s works are often quoted as examples for the concept of ‘hauntology’, an idea launched by British pop culture theorists Simon Reynolds and the late Mark Fisher. The artist name is a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s film rendition of Stephen King’s The Shining, particularly the infamous ‘haunted ballroom scene’.

This sad and ghostly tune is from Stage 1 of The Caretaker’s six-part album Everywhere at the End of Time, often considered his magnum opus and released in six-month intervals between 2016 and 2019. The album portrays the different stages of Alzheimer’s disease, mirroring the irreversible cognitive decline of a dementia patient. Representing the first signs of memory deterioration, the music on Stage 1 still sounds more like “a beautiful daydream” (Kirby) than the dark ambient and noise music prevalent in later stages. The main sample in this particular song is a medley by English musician and dance band leader Maurice Winnick.

This album became part of internet culture in the early 2020s, both as a listening challenge on social media (it’s 6.5 hours long) and as a meme connected to analog horror and liminal spaces content. If you want to know more about this album and Kirby’s other work, the music YouTuber Pad Chennington, whom I’ve interviewed earlier this week, published a two-hour-plus video breakdown.

04

Boards Of Canada – The Word Becomes Flesh (2026)

The Backrooms end credits tune. It’s from Boards of Canada’s brand new album Inferno, which arrived on the same day that Backrooms hit U.S. theaters. In a recent interview with GQ, Parsons confirmed that the Scottish duo’s music was a key inspiration for the whole soundtrack.

While the Trump administration previously used the Inferno tune “Deep Time” without consent from the label and the artists in a social media video, the appearance of “The Word Becomes Flesh” in Backrooms feels like a respectful nod from a purveyor of hauntology to its originators. I also really like the fact that Parsons used a fresh song from the new album as opposed to something more well-known from one of their canonical classics.

I’ve kept Inferno on steady rotation since release, but I haven’t written at length about it here just because I feel there are enough ‘takes’ out there already, and I don’t have anything substantial to add to the better reviews that have been published.

Just one little thing: A phrase I've read quite often recently, even in positive reviews like Philip Sherburne’s write-up for Pitchfork, is that it's their “best since Geogaddi” – but I’ve actually enjoyed both The Campfire Headphase and Tomorrow’s Harvest more than Geogaddi, so that ranking somehow doesn’t work for me at all.

For the record, I’ve enjoyed Geogaddi as well, and Inferno is brilliant, and hopefully, Backrooms will be too. Now I’ll just have to wait another full week until I can finally go watch it.