Chernobyl is a five-part miniseries about the massive explosion of April 26, 1986, at Chernobyl in Ukraine. Writer, creator, and executive producer Craig Mazin began researching the Chernobyl disaster in 2014, using a variety of materials, including several books, domestic and foreign government reports, and firsthand accounts.
The score was composed by Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir and was created using sound recordings from a real nuclear power plant. The thirteen-track score album was released in 2019. It was hailed as one of Guðnadóttir's best original score compositions, followed by the Joker soundtrack, released later that year.
In August 2018, during filming for the series, Guðnadóttir and score producer Chris Watson went to the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania (where the series was prominently filmed) to record dark ambient sounds for the score. For safety reasons, the music team wore hazmat suits while filming at the nuclear plant. She explained that she wanted the power plant—and the radiation—to be a voice in itself and "to understand the feeling of what must have been going through people's minds as they tried to navigate that disaster," resulting in a sound of "creeping death."
