Concerning spoilers: I avoided mentioning story plots in this review, but I have to address some concepts which you may not want to know.
If you told me a couple of years ago that I would write a review about new music from John Williams in 2026, I would not have believed it, considering his age. At 94 years old, he not only wrote a score for Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, but he also conducted the music himself. You don’t need to be a film music critic to know that Williams, the composer of Star Wars, Harry Potter and Schindler’s List, would write something amazing. It’s always exciting to see what he comes up with for a new Spielberg movie.
Spielberg has directed several movies about extraterrestrial life, like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with fantastic scores by Williams. One of the reasons they are so iconic is that the aliens in these movies are not like antagonists who want to conquer Earth. Instead, they can be kind and empathetic, as reflected in the music of both movies. Listening to the Disclosure Day album, with all its warm, emotional melodies, I could hear that tradition continuing.
You don’t have to listen long to find those tender sounds, as they appear at the start of the first track, “listen…” It is a gorgeous piece, with melodies that hit you in the heart – one of John Williams’s core strengths. The piece starts with one of the themes on the French horn, before the orchestra takes over. The listen theme returns in several places. A beautiful version opens “reprise…,” in which a female vocalist picks up the melody— a track that also features several other recurring melodies. One of these, the memory theme, is another highlight, and can be heard in “memory…” It features a joyful interaction between two melodies, performed on the piano and the French horn. In the part of the movie where this is played, I can see why the idea of a pair could have been a deliberate idea to support this scene.
What I find so fascinating about the music for Disclosure Day is how unmistakably it sounds like John Williams. His unique, out-of-this-world, orchestral writing can be heard in every note. In addition to the new themes, you can hear many styles and influences from his earlier scores throughout the music. In “negotiation… “ you can hear the tenseness in the lower strings, as “as he once did for Jaws. In “believe…,” you’ll hear a new theme, as well as melodies that remind me of E.T. And then there is “chase…,“ and while listening to it, I can almost see the TIE fighters from Star Wars chasing a target. Of course, the music isn’t note-for-note the same, but the style is definitely evident in these pieces.
For this review, I will not go into much detail about what these themes represent, because after seeing the film only once, I am unable to map them to a specific character or concept of the story. What I can say, though, is that they are all delicate-sounding themes, mostly performed by the orchestra, without the trumpets and trombones and a strong focus on the piano performing the melodies.
It is a marvelous treat to be able to enjoy a new John Williams score in 2026. While I do not think these new themes will live up to the ones from Star Wars or Indiana Jones, it is still one of the best scores I have listened to this year so far. Will this be the last score of John Williams? There’s a chance that Spielberg and Williams collaborate for the 31st time. Maybe he’ll just keep composing excellent soundtracks for a while longer.
Listen or buy
- Buy this soundtrack from Amazon or Apple Music
- Listen to this soundtrack on Spotify
Tracklist
The highlights are in bold.
- listen… (4:08)
- memory… (4:07)
- dive… (4:37)
- chase… (2:14)
- believe… (3:35)
- in vivo… (2:49)
- negotiation… (3:25)
- empathy… (2:24)
- celestial… (6:50)
- unseen… (3:09)
- kcxe… (5:56)
- signs… (2:37)
- home… (3:37)
- caught… (5:56)
- disclosure… (4:22)
- reprise… (4:54)
Total length: 1 hour and 4 minutes
Back Lot Music (2026)
