Anna Meredith’s ‘Wicker’ Score Puts Recorders Where the Electronics Usually Sit

The cast of Wicker will get the headlines: Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård. The more telling detail sits in the instrumentation. For this score, Anna Meredith has reportedly set aside the electronics that shape her own records and written for recorders instead.

The score is released on 30 October, with ‘Escape On Cart’ serving as its lead single. It lands alongside a second announcement: a new studio album, her first since FIBS, scheduled for February 2027. Its single and video, ‘Dusky’, are already out.

Meredith is not a newcomer to scoring, having written the music for Eighth Grade, and her concert work has long treated orchestral and electronic sound as material to be handled rather than respected. That makes the recorder an unsurprising choice from an artist who prefers plain tools. The instrument carries decades of schoolroom association, cheap and slightly blunt, which is precisely what makes it useful in a room where most scores reach for strings and synthesisers.

The timing is worth noting. A score due in weeks and an album due in well over a year is an unusual pairing to announce together, and it splits her output into two registers: the collaborative, deadline-bound work of film, and the slower, self-directed work of her own records.

Listeners get the first of those in October, and a clear enough signal of the second in ‘Dusky’.