Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore Score Documentary About Olympic Skier Jessie Diggins

Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore have announced a second collaborative album this year, this time as a score for Threshold, a documentary about Olympic cross-country skier Jessie Diggins, directed by Lars and Torsten Brinkema. Three tracks — “Cold Open,” “Sick and Tired,” and “Gallivare 10km” — are out now, ahead of the project’s full release on November 20.

The duo’s first album together, Tragic Magic, arrived in January, built around a deliberately limited set of instruments. The new score works from the opposite premise. In a statement, Lattimore describes the contrast: “While Tragic Magic had constraints of instruments we were able to use, including historic, delicate and mysterious ones, along with those constraints, we had total sonic freedom. In the case of Threshold, the sky was the limit with instrumentation and we held an expansive palette, but our music existed within the framework of Jessie’s life and the vision of the directors.”

The distinction matters. Barwick and Lattimore did not need a documentary to justify working together again, but a score imposes a different kind of discipline. Instead of shaping sound around their own decisions, they shaped it around someone else’s arc. Whether that framework produces a tighter set or simply a different one will be clear when the full release lands with the film.