It’s unhealthy to stuff all that lasciviousness back down into ourselves, so SFA offer a kind of release, a climax of sorts, squelching guitars and strings and percussion beating back sorrow with sheer force. I fed my kid through the credits so at least there was that.

“No Hard Feelings” is about dying with no regrets, about the day when one’s soul leaves their body and all that’s left to focus on is the joy that defines a life. Or, as Seth puts it, “Holding the love I’ve known in my life.” This is an end-of-the-world song for the faithful folks who just believe everything works out the way it should. (Is “no more Arizona” really such a great loss, though?)

Listen to and download the music, ost, score, list of songs and trailers.
“Leaving The City” from 2015’s Matt Maltese’s apocalypse scene is far more literal and heartbreaking than others in this list. “I’d love to see the end someday,” Gruff Rhys wistfully dreams, “of Citizen Kane.” Which isn’t so much a cinephile’s confession as it is a symptom of someone who knows time’s running out and still has so much left to do. “Fine time to walk on wine,” he adds, an admonition to those willing to dull themselves into believing a miracle will save them, hiding from reality behind minutiae like movies one didn’t see or wine one didn’t drink or people with whom one never got to copulate. This happens twice. Ever since cave drawings were a thing (and possibly even before that), people have been depicting cataclysmic events in their art, so songs about the end of the world are a natural extension of that. But listen to it enough times, and Judgement Day imagery will begin to unfold. It’s the kind of event that triggers a spiral so dangerous that Reznor (or the unnamed narrator) considers self-sabotage and imagines a hellish alternate universe that would still be preferable to reality. When Trent Reznor sings about the world going away, we can’t totally be sure what he means.
While other songs conjure metaphors about the end times, Maltese fantasizes about the brief wait time after the nuclear button has been pressed. In trademark maximalist ease, Super Furry Animals coin the phrase “atomic lust” between loose piano riffs and growing walls of sound. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack “Find some atomic lust,” Rhys encourages, “whenever more or less.” Whether that’s optimism—the brightness of the track almost taunting those willing to resign themselves to the apocalypse—or an acceptance that we’ll just have to make due with what we have, “Atomik Lust” is as much a reminder, as we teeter over the precipice of a new world (kinda), of who we are as who we could’ve been.



Obviously Hawkwind’s sci-fi oeuvre was going to include at least true banger of a post-apocalypse jam.