The lead single from the third Dune soundtrack opens with the film’s star humming a solitary line before the arrangement swells into a Fremen war chant. Zimmer wrote and produced the track; the film arrives December 18.
The first sound on “Desert Chant” is Timothée Chalamet humming. Warner Bros. has released the track as the lead single from the Dune: Part Three soundtrack, credited to Hans Zimmer, who wrote and produced it, with the film’s lead actor supplying one unaccompanied melodic line before the piece opens into a Fremen war chant.
Chalamet does not sing. He holds a single solemn phrase, and the arrangement does the rest, gathering voices and percussion until the hum is no longer recognizable as a hum. It is a neat piece of casting: the star’s voice entering the score not as a performance but as raw material.
Zimmer scored both earlier installments for Denis Villeneuve. The new film adapts Dune Messiah, Herbert’s colder and stranger sequel, set 17 years after Part Two and following Paul Atreides as emperor, his prescient visions clouding as his rule hardens. The track’s movement from private breath to collective chant tracks that shift without underlining it.
Zimmer has described the Villeneuve partnership as one built on a shared adolescence with the book, a collaboration rooted in the novel that caught them both young. The cast returns Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem and Florence Pugh, whose Princess Irulan takes on more weight this time, with Anya Taylor-Joy back as Alia Atreides and Robert Pattinson and Isaach de Bankolé joining the franchise.
Dune:
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