Miles Morales Deserved This Soundtrack

Sunflower came out in October and I’d been waiting for the rest ever since. Post Malone and Swae Lee managed something genuinely light with that one—warm, almost delicate, nothing like what you’d expect from a Marvel animated feature. The full Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack is now on streaming, and the lineup reads like a particular kind of late-2018 time capsule: Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Ty Dolla Sign, Juice WRLD, Ski Mask the Slump God, Jacquees, XXXTentacion. Thirteen tracks, all of them sitting somewhere between the film’s visual chaos and the moment rap was actually having.

The film follows Miles Morales, a Brooklyn teenager who discovers he’s not the only Spider-Man after crossing paths with a Peter Parker he thought was dead. The villain is Wilson Fisk—the Kingpin—who’s built a particle collider capable of punching holes between dimensions, which is why Miles ends up surrounded by alternate-universe spider-people: a burnt-out, middle-aged Peter B. Parker who’s clearly given up on most things, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Man Noir, a cartoon pig called Spider-Ham, and Peni Parker from some future mecha-Tokyo. It’s the kind of premise that should collapse under its own weight and instead becomes one of the best superhero films made, animated or otherwise. The animation style looks like a comic book in physical motion—panel borders, Ben-Day dots, color separation—and it never stops moving.

What’s Up Danger by Blackway and Black Caviar is the other advance single, and it sounds like falling and not minding. The full album holds up around those two anchors. It’s rare for a soundtrack to feel this intentional—usually these things are just an excuse to attach familiar names to a release date. This one actually sounds like Miles Morales’ world. Which is the only thing you can really ask of it.