If you haven’t yet watched The Idol, don’t bother. HBO’s sleazy music industry satire about unhappy pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) falling under the spell of ludicrously creepy wannabe manager Tedros Tedros (Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye, who co-created the show with Euphoria showrunner Sam Levinson) is so bad it’s bad: a lurid miasma of grim titillation, saggy plotting, tonal confusion (let’s just say cringe comedy and graphic abuse are not natural bedfellows) and retina-searingly incessant displays of Depp’s underboob.
Yet if you have persevered with The Idol for whatever reason (sadomasochism?), you will have received an unexpected gift: a maddeningly persistent but seductively seedy earworm called World Class Sinner/I’m a Freak, the track that Jocelyn’s label are pushing as her comeback single in the show and that, in reality, is now being touted as a prospective summer anthem, having clocked up 11m Spotify streams over the past few weeks. Although Jocelyn is fictional, the track – which is both an arch collage of bad-girl tropes delivered with amusingly flat disaffection, and a shimmering dance-pop banger – very much isn’t. Credited to Depp, it was released on the first of five separate EPs – one for each corresponding episode (the series concludes on Sunday) – that together form an original, music-only version of The Idol’s OST.
It will probably be no shock to learn that the music from The Idol is far superior to the show itself – especially considering it was mainly written by Tesfaye, a man with seven US No 1 singles but no major television credits to his name. The good news is you don’t need to subject yourself to The Idol to appreciate its soundtrack. Although most numbers riff on the show’s content, their musings on the ugly underbelly of celebrity and disturbingly dysfunctional relationships are ambiguous enough to be enjoyed on their own terms – see: Fill the Void, a hypnotically serpentine dirge with echoes of grinding electro and haunting devotional music, which doubles as the central action of episode four. Even the show’s theme, The Lure, an eerie, Blade Runner-esque instrumental that settles on the knife’s edge between sentimental and sinister, works well as a standalone track. Some songs actually fare better out of context: the Weeknd’s synth-and-melisma-powered version of Jealous Guy is a pleasingly modern take on a classic, but feels too on-the-nose when set next to Tedros’s unhinged behaviour.
Like many of the tracks here, Jealous Guy slots effortlessly into the Weeknd’s oeuvre; he made his name by combining maudlin, 80s-flavoured R&B with scuzzy production and seamy lyrics, a style that patently chimes with the show’s vibe. He isn’t the only musician who appears in The Idol. Among Tedros’s acolytes are Izaak, played not entirely convincingly by Moses Sumney, who brings his talents to the beautiful, multi-textured soul of Get It B4, and Dyanne, AKA Jennie from K-pop girl group Blackpink, who features on the hooky One of the Girls. Suzanna Son, who plays uber-guileless follower Chloe, delivers the soundtrack’s only real dud – the irritatingly faux-naive piano ballad Family, whose lyrics make little sense inside or outside the universe of the show – but has far more success on False Gods, where her piercing voice is sped up and set against whirring trap and a verse from rapper Lil Baby.
Generally speaking, The Idol’s original music feels like the place where the virtuosity, excitement and lasting worth of the whole project lies. That’s partly because what works in pop music – moral and tonal ambivalence; camp vapidity; tongue-in-cheek outrageousness; leaning heavily on the audience to provide meaning – doesn’t really cut it in television, a medium which relies less on vague impressions and more on propulsive, logical plotting and an identifiable – if moveable – moral centre. In many ways, The Idol has proven a failure – yet its soundtrack has proven something else: that the best delivery method for a slippery, uncomfortably nefarious send-up of pop stardom is probably pop music itself.
