Why you can't skip The White Lotus intro banger, according to a music expert

Everyone's favourite show about the world's one percent is back, with a new cast, new Sicily location and revamped theme song. The second season of Mike White's critically acclaimed White Lotus is so far offering the same roasting of the ultra-rich, with even higher production values and mouth-watering shots of the Mediterranean any influencer would die for. 

But as the storyline delicately unfolds, fans of the show are already losing it for the hypnotic new opening credits tune. Season 1 began with the unsettling "Aloha!" by Emmy Award-winning composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, but in a nod to the show's new direction, ‘Renaissance’ – also written Tapia de Veer – starts more like an Italian opera with majestic vocals. But just as a holiday at the White Lotus resort never goes to plan (and spoiler: we already know death is on the cards), so too the theme tune becomes increasingly chaotic, returning back to “Aloha” but with a pounding heartbeat-like beat you'd expect in a sweaty club at 5am.

Unsurprisingly, TikTok is already full of reaction videos. 

TikToker Taylor Owen, previously known for her viral series “If Real Life Was Succession”, posted a theme song reaction video which now has 450 thousand views. 

Titled “watching the White Lotus Season 2 theme song for the first time” Owen and her partner look baffled when the music starts with a tranquil plucking of a harp, along with grand melodic vocals. Within seconds they're bouncing, and increasingly captivated by the frenetic beat until they're off the sofa and dancing like their lives depend on it. 

Many users have turned the credits into a meme and combined it with clips of Kris Jenner, Britney Spears or Chris Lilley as Ja'mie dancing and captions like: “No i will not be hitting “skip intro” thank you very much.”

It's almost as if the theme tune was designed to go viral on TikTok… Anyway, some have even said they feel religious ascension by the end of the song. 

So why does it hit so hard? Edward Venn, Professor of Music at Leeds University said for him it's the way the song “continually offers up reassuringly familiar ideas, only to pull the rug from out of us and to turn it into something uncomfortable.

“So there’s that opening piano figure, conjuring up memories of classical music and grace. But from the start, it’s not quite settled: the rhythms have the irregular insistence of, say, John Carpenter’s theme to Halloween," Venn says. “And the chord progression that follows recalls [British composer] John Murphy’s favourite harmonic sequence to generate a sense of foreboding, heard in 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Kick Ass, as well as evoking the opening of The Haunting of Hill House.”

Venn continues: “It’s the way that the initial minor chord moves to the major – offering a sense of hope, of respite – only for it to slide back, continually and unstoppably, to the threatening implications of that minor chord. From the outset the theme is deeply unsettling.”

The opera singer evokes “the glitz and glamour of classical music; familiar, too, in the way her melody recalls the theme tune of season 1 of The White Lotus”. But viewers can never get too comfortable, because “a wavering, electronically generated version of the tune pitches us deep into the uncanny valley: it’s neither human nor non-human, but uncomfortably between the two”. 

Then there's that perfect-for-TikTok bass. Venn says its Europop credentials locate us in modern Italy, and “its insistent pounding, in parallel with increasingly insistent percussion, combines with distorted melody and threatening chord progressions - and an added layer of distorted atonal noises - carry the theme, and all its uncanny, foreboding qualities, to a powerful close”.

It's an indisputable banger – certified by a music expert. Now we're just waiting for it to actually infiltrate clubs.