You might not know what an EBDITA is or what “half a yard at 4 cents” means or what a “one-year Euro swap in 500k DV01” is all about, but that’s the unmistakable dialect of HBO’s Industry. Now in its fourth and penultimate season, part of Industry’s appeal, since it arrived in 2020, has been its inscrutable jargon as it peeks into the world of how the 1% manage their money. The portrait of bright, power-crazed bankers places its protagonists in a whirl of sex, drugs, and seedy deals against a backdrop of embezzlement, aristocratic scandal, and now, international spycraft.
It’s a world so unimaginably cutthroat, even the darkest moments have an absurdist quality that allow them to land almost like comedic relief. “If you’re going to have a fucking stroke, please do it outside my office,” Harper Stern (played by Myha’la), one of the show’s key tyrants, quips to a raging client right before he plummets into her glass desk. The atrophy of empathy has become such a fixture of the show’s emotional mechanism that watching this, my only reaction as an unconscious man was wheeled out of Harper’s office by paramedics was to laugh.
Written by former investment bankers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, Industry shares the same anxious DNA as workplace dramas like Succession while offering nuanced character studies within the young-people-trying-to-make-it genre comparable to Mad Men and Girls. What started in season one as a group of hot young things partying as hard as they traded has evolved into a high-stakes psychosexual political thriller. The fourth season is easily the show’s best and most disturbing. By the end, it’s revealed that the fintech startup at the center of the season, Tender, is an entirely fraudulent front for Russian intelligence.
In order for Tender to retain power, a cocktail of murder, sex-trafficking, and razoblachenie takes place. This derails longtime characters like Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), who is framed for manslaughter, Eric Tao (Ken Leung), who is coerced into receiving fellatio from an underage girl, and the aristocratic Henry Muck, (Kit Harrington), whose now ex-fiancée, Yasmin Hanani (Marisa Abela), helped finger him as a scapegoat for the ultimate fall of Tender. In the finale, it’s revealed that Yasmin, in a bid for more control, has continued the child sex trafficking ring Tender left behind. The only central character who comes out winning this season is Harper—because she is someone who bets on other people losing.
Beyond its brutal storyline, Industry’s highs and lows are delivered somatically through its magnetic score, composed by the Copenhagen-based producer Nathan Micay. Micay works hand in hand with the show’s music supervisor, Ollie White, who is responsible for this season’s incredible (and surely expensive) needle drops from Donna Summer and Daft Punk. Micay has a long history with club music, starting out as a bass DJ touring with Skrillex—listen out for the Hyperdub nod as Henry yells, “Get me Jacob Oleander!” in episode six—before playing trance and techno at clubs like Berghain after the dubstep boom settled. Since Industry’s pilot, Micay has landed on a sound as layered as the show’s characters. He builds tension with growling sub-bass while elsewhere capturing the corporate optimism of the late millennium with incandescent arpeggios and soaring synthlines. His synth work conjures the romantic fantasies of high-rises and all-white lounges that French musicians Jean-Luc Ponty and Wally Badarou once evoked in their ’80s albums.
Micay completed this season’s score two weeks before the show premiered. Typically, there are months-long stretches “between finishing and airing just to see if there’s any quick things we have to fix,” Micay said over Zoom while in Kyoto, Japan. “But I think HBO really wanted to have this out.” For the first time in the past four years of his Industry work, Micay asked for help, enlisting his friend Aquarian, who produces under the Dekmantel label. “Poor Aquarian, I think it was a bit disheartening for him to come in, and I’d just be like, yeah, for these 20 seconds, just try to capture the essence of that temp,” he said. “And he writes this big original thing. I’m like, scale it back. Scale it right back.”
