‘Loki’ composer Natalie Holt wrote that glorious theme without ever seeing the show

The jury’s still out on where Loki will rank in the growing Marvel television universe, but Natalie Holt’s musical score has been a mind-blowing highlight since episode 1.

A British composer who grew up playing violin, Holt gives Loki a sound that is at once eerie and playful — the most perfect musical accompaniment we can imagine for the God of Mischief in his first solo outing. Mashable spoke with Holt about the challenges (and surprising ease) of scoring Loki, which concludes on July 14.

“You know that feeling when you’re sitting in a symphony orchestra and you hear that might and the weight of a big orchestra playing a theme? I wanted it to have that, but also have the range to be kind of nimble as well,” she says via Zoom interview. “He is quite mercurial and he’s not always big and bold, he’s sometimes kind of shifty and… I just knew it needed to have that range.”

Despite the challenge of personifying Loki’s multitudes via melody, Holt says she came up with the main Loki theme before her pitch meeting with director Kate Herron — based on scripts alone.

“I came up with the theme for him just super quick,” she recalls. “So it’s been there for me in my head, associated with him from day one.”

Herron requested use of the electronic theremin to give Loki that otherworldly sound. Holt had recently met thereminist Charlie Draper, “the perfect guy to collaborate with” and a Marvel fan to boot. Holt had never composed for theremin before, or even worked with a large brass section like the one heard in the Loki theme, but Herron and Kevin Feige encouraged her to experiment “push it too far.”

“I feel like I always want to do something a bit twisted and unusual in what I’m writing, I always want to turn things on their head a little bit,” Holt says. “The whole thing about Loki was doing something unusual and just being really creative and trying stuff out… So that was amazing to have their support to try out something different.”

The Thor movies do not share a common composer — Patrick Doyle wrote the score for the first Thor, Bryan Tyler did The Dark World, and Ragnarok’s Mark Mothersbaugh will return for Love and Thunder. While a few themes repeat throughout the series, Marvel was fine with Loki being entirely new.

The main themes of Loki are simple, but Holt enriches them with layered harmonies, surprising chord progressions, and of course that heavy brass. Like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier composer Henry Jackman, she looks up to Alan Silvestri and his work on The Avengers — “his coloring and the kind of textures that he creates.”

Holt also worked extensively with the Swedish nyckelharpa and Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, both stringed instruments that still proved difficult to translate to from violin. She ended up entrusting the experienced folk players to improvise the right sound for pieces like “Frigga.”

“I was like, ‘Just play it,'” she says. “‘Give it some heart, and you can add some folk ornamentation to it as well’. And then receiving things back once people had played their solo parts was so unexpected and elevated it.”

“I always think composers have to be so thankful for the incredible skills of the musicians that they’re working with,” she adds “Because if you heard what stuff sounded like when I’m thrashing it out on the piano, like scratching my bad violin over the top — if it was just me on my own, it would sound awful. I have to be so thankful for all the people I collaborate with.”

Loki airs Wednesdays on Disney+.