Composers Bring Grandeur and Silliness to Exploding Kittens Score

Los Angeles, CA (August 2, 2024)—What does an epic battle between supreme beings trapped in the form of overweight house cats sound like? Composing partners Shirley Song and Jina An loaded up their orchestral samples and got to work crafting a score that balances epic grandeur and silliness.

Netflix’s Exploding Kittens series, inspired by the best-selling card game, pulls absurdist comedy from the juxtaposition of divine warfare and low-stakes domestic drama. Series co-creators Matthew Inman and Shane Kosakowski turned to Song and An for the score, and they in turn reached for Orchestral Tools’ Metropolis Ark series of sample libraries.

“We could tell how crazy the show was going to be just based on how wildly varied the musical reference points the creators had when we were initially brought in to discuss it,” An says. “It became immediately clear that the show needed a totally straight-faced orchestral approach at its core to balance with the more comedic elements of the show, while also serving as a juxtaposition to the other types of music we’d be creating on an episode-by-episode basis.”

​Song and An have been composing together since their time as students at Berklee College of Music. They have collaborated on many different projects, including The Breadwinner, XO Kitty and A Tourists’ Guide to Love.

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Song and An, drawing from prior acting experience, knew that playing it ‘straight’ with the music would add additional comedic emphasis to the series. “The key to making that happen on a sonic level was using Orchestral Tools’ Metropolis Ark libraries,” An continues. “They have a reputation as being a slightly tongue-in-cheek take on the ‘epic sound’ of dramatic trailer music. That sensibility was a perfect fit for Exploding Kittens.”

“We needed a lot of choral layers and big, bombastic brass clusters for the score, and Metropolis Ark excels at those,” Song says. “It was just perfect for that big epic sound, and having all of those playable runs and flourishes makes the score sound extremely realistic.”

She adds, “That’s always part of the challenge with scoring with libraries—you want to add that human feel even when it might not be in the budget. With OT, it’s very easy for us to do that and they layer so well together that it sounds totally authentic.”