These are the first nominees for the 25th World Soundtrack Awards!

Volker Bertelmann is an internationally acclaimed pianist, composer and experimental musician. In 2023 he won a BAFTA and Oscar in the Best Original Score category for All Quiet on the Western Front. Most recently, he received his first Primetime Emmy nomination in the Original Main Title Theme Music category for his work on the main title theme for HBO’s Dune: Prophecy. Bertelmann is an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Daniel Blumberg is a musician and artist from London. Blumberg has released three solo albums on Mute - Gut (2023), On&On (2020) and Minus (2018) and composed two film scores, The World To Come (dir. Mona Fastvold, 2020) and The Brutalist (dir. Brady Corbet) - forthcoming films are The Testament of Ann Lee (dir. Mona Fastvold) and Suono le Nuvole (dir. Gianfranco Rosi).

Kris Bowers is an Academy Award® winning filmmaker and composer. He most recently received an Oscar nomination for his score for The Wild Robot, and in 2023 co-directed The Last Repair Shop, a documentary which spotlights some of the individuals working at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s music instrument repair shop.

Camille, born in Paris, has crafted an extraordinary musical world over two decades, blending poetry, rhythm, and voice. Her 2002 debut, “Le Sac des Filles", introduced her lyrical style. Since then, she’s collaborated with legends, from David Byrne to Hans Zimmer. Clément Ducol is a Golden Globe-winning French composer, arranger, and music producer, renowned for his film scores and collaborations across classical and contemporary pop genres. Together, they recently scored “Emilia Perez” for which they won a Golden Globe for Best Song “El Mal”. They have also received 3 Academy Award nominations for the film in the Best Score category and Best Song for “El Mal” and “Mi Camino”.

Alberto Iglesias is one of Spain’s most celebrated and internationally acclaimed film composers. With a career spanning over three decades, he has composed the original scores for more than 40 feature films, collaborating with some of the world’s most renowned directors. Iglesias won the Best Soundtrack Award at the Cannes Film Festival, three European Film Awards, two World Soundtrack Awards for Composer of the Year. Furthermore, he has been nominated for four Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and three BAFTA Awards. Widely admired for the emotional depth, harmonic richness, and refined textures of his music, Iglesias is also a classically trained composer with a background in electronic and avant-garde music.

John Powell began his career writing music and assisting composer Patrick Doyle. Powell was catapulted into the realm of A-list composers with the entirely original voice of the first installment of Bourne trilogy, The Bourne Identity. Since then, he has been a leading composer in animation, with credits in the Ice Age-, Happy Feet-, and Kung Fu Panda franchises. The iconic score for the animated How to Train Your Dragon earned him his first Academy Award nomination. Recently, he scored the first part of Jon M. Chu’s Wicked and is currently working on the upcoming sequel, Wicked: For Good.

Volker Bertelmann is an internationally acclaimed pianist, composer and experimental musician. In 2023 he won a BAFTA and Oscar in the Best Original Score category for All Quiet on the Western Front. Most recently, he received his first Primetime Emmy nomination in the Original Main Title Theme Music category for his work on the main title theme for HBO’s Dune: Prophecy. Bertelmann is an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

David Fleming is an Emmy-winning American composer who has written music for film and television including most recently, Season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us, collaborating once again with Gustavo Santaolalla, and James Gunn’s upcoming DC film Superman. Gustavo Santaolalla, a two-time Oscar winning multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer and composer, is recognized as one of the most highly acclaimed and prolific contemporary Argentine musicians in the world.

An Emmy-nominated composer Ariel Marx draws from many genres and often combines orchestral and rare instruments with electronics. Her scores have premiered in films at Sundance, TIFF, SXSW, Tribeca, Woodstock, Criterion Channel, as well as films and shows on Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, FX, HBO, Mubi, Discovery+ and more. She is a member of the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Television Academy, and is a Sundance Film Music and Sound Design Lab alumni. In 2025, Ariel received two Emmy nominations for her original scores for the FX series Dying For Sex and Black Mirror: Hotel Reverie.

Bear McCreary has won three Emmy Awards and has won twelve International Film Music Critics Association Awards, including the award for Score of the Year in 2024. Project highlights include The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power; Foundation, the beloved series Outlander, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, The Walking Dead and Netflix’s Academy Award–nominated documentary Crip Camp. McCreary’s celebrated scores for Sony PlayStation’s blockbusters God of War and God of War Ragnarök have earned him two BAFTA Awards and two Grammy nominations.

Since scoring his first TV drama, Eureka Street in 2002, Martin Phipps has won 2 BAFTAs, 5 Ivor Novello Awards and received multiple Emmy nominations for writing music to many of the most interesting series of recent years. These include the BBC’s War and Peace, Hugo Blick’s The Honourable Woman, Peaky Blinders, Black Mirror and season 3 through 6 of the acclaimed Netflix series The Crown. Recently Martin has scored Sir Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Ed Perkins’ The Princess, and Amazon Studios’ series Solos starring Morgan Freeman.

Theodore Shapiro is an Emmy Award-winning composer with a prolific filmography. Most recently, Shapiro returned to score the second season of Apple TV+’s critically-acclaimed Severance. His haunting, atmospheric score has garnered wide praise for elevating the show’s unsettling tone, with critics dubbing it “iconic”, “perfect” and “eerily catchy”. Outside of Severance, Shapiro’s has built a reputation as a master of comedy scores, notably scoring iconic comedies like The Devil Wears Prada, 13 Going On 30 and Dodgeball. Beyond that, however, his extensive body of work spans a wide variety of films, with turns scoring the likes of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and Bombshell.

written by Andrew Wyatt, Lykke Li, and Miley Cyrus | performed by Miley Cyrus, Andrew Wyatt, Matt Dunkley

written by Clément Ducol, - Camille -, & Jacques Audiard | performed by Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón

written by Ludwig Göransson, Raphael Saadiq | performed by Miles Caton

written by Elton John, Brandi Carlile, Andrew Watt, Bernie Taupin | performed by Elton John, Brandi Carlile

written by Nicholas Britell, Steve McQueen, Taura Stinson | performed by Nicholas Britell, Saoirse Ronan