These are the nominees for the 26th World Soundtrack Awards!

Hildur Guðnadóttir is an Academy Award, Golden Globe, two-time Grammy, BAFTA, and Emmy-winning Icelandic artist, who has been manifesting herself at the forefront of experimental pop and contemporary. Her work for Film, Television, and Video Games includes Joker, Joker: Folie á Deux, TÁR, Women Talking, A Haunting in Venice, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Mary Magdalena, Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 2042, and the HBO series Chernobyl. Hildur was named Television Composer of the Year and Film Composer of the Year by the World Soundtrack Academy.

Max Richter is an Oscar-nominated composer and one of the most influential and acclaimed musical voices of his generation. Renowned for redefining contemporary classical music through the seamless fusion of traditional orchestration and modern electronic elements, Richter’s work spans solo albums, ballet, film, fashion and installation. His singular ability to translate profound human experience into sound has earned him a vast global following, with his catalogue now surpassing three billion streams worldwide.

Jonny Greenwood is an English composer and musician, best known as guitarist and keyboardist of Radiohead. Alongside his work with the band, he has built an extensive career in orchestral composition and film scoring, collaborating regularly with director Paul Thomas Anderson since There Will Be Blood (2007). His most recent film score is for Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025), released on Nonesuch Records. Greenwood served as Featured Artist for the Hallé's 2025–26 season.

Film after film, Alexandre Desplat, a true cinephile, develops his own style, his singularity and his incomparable art to produce a special tone, an identity for each movie score. His music plays like another actor on and off screen creating a vibration and showing the invisible emotions of the characters. The richness of his writing allows him not only to write epic symphonic scores but to mix World music or Jazz instrumentation in his soundtracks for Argo, Zero dark thirty or The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Daniel Pemberton is an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning composer and songwriter who has regularly been cited as one of the most exciting and original new voices working in modern film scoring today. He has scored films for some of the industry’s most legendary figures such as Ridley Scott (All the Money in the World, The Counselor), Danny Boyle (Yesterday, Steve Jobs), Aaron Sorkin (Being The Ricardos, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Molly’s Game), and Guy Ritchie (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., King Arthur: Legend of the Sword).

Multi-Academy and Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer Finneas O’Connell has quietly emerged as an unassumingly ubiquitous presence in popular music and culture. He achieved stratospheric success through his work with his sister Billie Eilish, earning eleven Grammy Awards, two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards for Best Original Song for “No Time To Die” from No Time To Die and “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie.

David Fleming is an Emmy-winning American composer who has written music for film and television. He co-scored James Gunn’s DC film Superman and HBO’s The Last of Us, for which he received a WSA nomination as Television Composer of the Year as well as an SCL Award nomination. His score for Ron Howard’s Jim Henson: Idea Man earned him a Primetime Emmy Award and ASCAP Composer’s Choice Award for Documentary Score of the Year, with his work on Amazon’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith bringing him a second Emmy nomination.

Martin Phipps has won two BAFTAs, five Ivor Novello Awards and received multiple Emmy nominations for writing music to many of the most interesting television series of recent years. He is most known for his work on the Leftbank Pictures/ Netflix series The Crown, Sir Ridley Scott’s Napoleon for Apple, and the first season of BBC’s smash hit Peaky Blinders. Benji Merrison is a British composer working across film and television, known for his distinctive scores for Dynasties and The Green Planet.

Dave Porter is a Los Angeles–based composer for film and television, perhaps best known for his enduring creative partnership with one of Hollywood’s most respected storytellers, Vince Gilligan. Beginning with the remarkable pilot episode of Breaking Bad in 2007, Porter composed the original music for the critically acclaimed spin-off Better Call Saul, brought the Breaking Bad universe to the big screen with his score for El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, and wrote the mysterious score for Apple TV+’s hit series Pluribus.

Jeff Russo is an Emmy Award-winning and Grammy-nominated composer, scoring varied and compelling music for film, television and video games. His music can be heard on shows such as Apple TV+’s Cape Fear, Amazon Prime’s season 2 of Citadel, FX’s Alien: Earth, Fargo, for which Russo received an Emmy in 2017 and four additional nominations, and Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, Cursed, and Altered Carbon.

written by Charli XCX, John Cale, Nathan Klein, Finn Keane | performed by Charli XCX, John Cale

written by Kim Eun-jae, Mark Sonnenblick, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seo, Teddy Park | performed by Huntrix

written by Stephen Schwartz | performed by Cynthia Erivo

written by Hildur Guðnadóttir, Nia DaCosta | performed by Mariam Wallentin

written by Nick Cave, Bryce Dessner | performed by Nick Cave

Mari Fukuhara is a Tokyo-based Japanese composer and pianist. She has composed music for film, animation, television, and visual media, developing a distinctive musical language that combines impressionistic piano writing with orchestral textures and electronic sounds. Her score for Little Amélie explores the world through the perception of a young child, blending piano and strings with marimba, harp, koto, and subtle electronic elements.

Paris Hurley is a composer, performer, and songwriter widely recognized for her genre-spanning sound. A classically trained violinist of 37 years turned post-punk vocalist, her work is raw, defiant, and refined ranging from scores for film and TV, to records, rock shows, and string quartets. Paris scored The Chronology of Water, written and directed by Kristen Stewart, which premiered at Cannes (2025).

For nearly two decades, Kangding Ray (David Letellier) has occupied a singular position within contemporary electronic music, building sonic landscapes that extend far beyond the conventional boundaries of the dancefloor. Moving seamlessly between techno, ambient music and experimental composition, his work exists in a space where precision, emotion and innovation converge.

Hannah Peel is a Northern Irish artist, composer, producer and broadcaster. Her music often crosses boundaries between electronic, live instrumentation and sound design. Her credits include Mubi's 2025 'neo-western' thriller Bring Them Down; the Netflix film Scoop starring Gillian Anderson and Billie Piper; plus Sky's 7-part sci-fi adaptation The Midwich Cuckoos, for which she won the Ivor Novello 'Best TV Soundtrack'.

Sam Slater is a composer and producer working across film and interactive media. His recent work includes the score for the PlayStation title Saros and 2000 Meters to Andriivka, directed by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mstyslav Chernov, marking him as a distinctive emerging voice in screen composition. His broader practice in experimental music and interdisciplinary collaboration informs a refined and textural approach to storytelling through sound.

Daniel Pemberton is an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy winning composer and songwriter who has regularly been cited as one of the most exciting and original new voices working in modern film scoring today. He has scored films for some of the industry’s most legendary figures such as Ridley Scott, Aaron Sorkin, Celine Song and Guy Ritchie and written songs with the likes of Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, Busta Rhymes, Drake, and many more.

Simon Franglen is a multi-award-winning composer and producer of film, classical, and contemporary music. He recently followed on his critically acclaimed score for Avatar: The Way of Water with the score to Avatar: Fire and Ash released in late 2025. He’s done multiple film and TV projects with Antoine Fuqua, Terrence Malick and others, his music credits include The Weeknd, Celine Dion, Miley Cyrus, Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones. 

Kevin is an award-winning songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist of a range of musical styles. Born in Mexico City, he studied in the UK and Spain before making his way into the Los Angeles film industry. He’s recently scored Adult Swim’s Women Wearing Shoulder Pads, HBO Max’s Frankelda's Book of Spooks and the acclaimed Mexican stop-motion feature film Soy Frankelda.

Czech-American, Los Angeles-based composer Ludek Drizhal writes richly orchestral, melody-driven film scores rooted in the tradition of symphonic storytelling. His most recent score, for Francesco Lucente’s fantasy epic Starbright, earned a nomination for the 2026 World Soundtrack Public Choice Award and was praised by critic Jonathan Broxton as a return to “a bygone era of film music where melody, orchestration, and storytelling went hand in hand.”

The subtle nuances of composer Marcelo Zarvos’ style are exemplified in his recent scores for the smash-hit K-Pop Kemon Hunters, Hulu’s Good American Family, Netflix's critically acclaimed The Diplomat, May December directed by Todd Haynes, and Nonnas directed by Stephen Chbosky. Zarvos was twice Emmy nominated for You Don’t Know Jack and Taking Chance.

Ryan Lott is a composer, producer, and performer. In 2007, Ryan founded Son Lux, releasing music that “works at the nexus of several rarely-overlapping Venn Diagrams” (Pitchfork). As a band, Son Lux scored the 2023 Best Picture Winner Everything Everywhere All at Once, which earned them a BAFTA and Academy Award nomination, with a second Academy Award nomination for their end-credit song collaboration with Mitski and David Byrne.

Nicolas Garcia is an award-winning French composer and multi-instrumentalist working across video games, film and television. His recent projects include video game Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, Australian feature film Pelverata, and  upcoming Spanish feature Censurada. His work blends traditional orchestral writing, rare instruments and modern technologies such as resynthesis to create distinctive musical identities shaped around storytelling and world-building.

Hwiman Ryu is an acclaimed South Korean audio director and composer, currently leading the audio department at Pearl Abyss. With extensive experience in game music production and sound engineering, he is recognized for his mastery in blending rich orchestral score with cutting-edge electronic elements to create deeply immersive soundscapes. Inro Joo is currently the Music Director for Crimson Desert at Pearl Abyss, leading its music direction. He uniquely brought the game's dark fantasy world to life through music by utilizing orchestras instead of mainstream pop.

Andrew Arcadi is a Northern California-based, self-taught composer and producer. Best known for his contributions to video game music, primarily for scoring Ad Hoc Studios’ “Dispatch” and Telltale Games’ “Minecraft: Story Mode”, Andrew leans on an unconventional approach to composition and production, as well as a weaponized sense of imposter syndrome, to create unique and memorable scores.

UNBEATABLE is both a rhythm game and a game about music, so the music is the thing's soul. To get that part right, the D-CELL SOUND TEAM (rj lake, Vasily Nikolaev, Rachel Lake and Clara Maddux) spent seven years creating over five and a half hours of original music for UNBEATABLE's story mode spread across a full vocal double album and its complete score. 

Margaret Hermant is a Brussels-based composer, violinist and harpist whose work is increasingly centered on film scoring and narrative music. A graduate of the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and a founding member of Echo Collective, she has developed a distinctive cinematic language that bridges contemporary classical composition, sound design and emotional storytelling.

Frederik Van de Moortel is a Belgian composer for film and television whose work spans large-scale orchestral scores, contemporary classical music, and experimental sound worlds. Drawing on a background in avant-garde composition as well as experience in both music and sound departments, he creates scores that balance dramatic storytelling with a distinctive musical voice.

Musician and composer Frédéric Vercheval was nominated for the Magritte du cinéma for Best Original Score five times, and won a Magritte for best original score in 2025 with his soundtrack for Green Border by Agnieszka Holland. He was nominated for the René du cinéma for Best Original Score for Les Tourmentés by Lucas Belvaux. His soundtrack for the film Duelles by Olivier Masset Depasse won a World Soundtrack Award in 2019.