Vice Principals is savage. There's no better word to describe the bleak HBO comedy from Danny McBride and Jody Hill (the team behind Eastbound and Down), which mines humor from the absolute depths of human pettiness. South Carolina vice principals Neal Gamby (McBride) and Lee Russell (Walton Goggins) begin the series first fighting over the principal's chair, eventually trying to sabotage the woman who eventually sits in it, Belinda Brown (Kimberly Hebert Gregory). Accordingly, Vice Principals is aggressively masculine, transforming everything from running a school to dealing with your neighbors to parenting into a horrifying pissing contest–an alarming but hilarious contrast that wouldn't work without the show's excellent score.

Everything happening on Vice Principals is low-stakes and petty, but it feels epic—especially when heavy, militaristic percussion accompanies scenes like a trust circle or a field trip, or when syrupy synths transform Gamby's attempt to learn how to ride motocross into an extended version of the Top Gun sex scene. And it's all thanks to Joseph Stephens, who has long worked with Hill as a composer on projects like Observe and Report and Eastbound.

In 2014, when Vice Principals was mostly an idea McBride and Hill were exploring, Stephens was essentially sent off on his own to discover what the sound of the show might be. "We had the idea of this kind of nostalgic, '80s-sounding genre, like a kind of Tangerine Dream score," he says.

The clash between the excitement and disgust produced by Gamby and Russell is at the heart of the series, and Stephens manages to contain both in the same musical bottle.

In particular, Stephens cites the non-comedic quality of John Carpenter scores as an inspiration for the series. "We weren't really going for the typical, upbeat '80s music you'd associate with a comedy show. We wanted to score this as a drama," which helps leaven what would otherwise be the heavier moments of the series. (Stephens cites Gamby's attempts to be a good father–a task at which he's still hapless and approaches with characteristic narcissism, but is at least grounded in something resembling normal emotions.) So Stephens acquired a bunch of old analog synthesizers, which produced greater inconsistency, more accurately mimicking the sloppiness and excess that characterized Stephens' '80s influences. "It kind of drifts," he says gleefully.

Eventually, he hit on the natural sound for what he describes as "the scholastic setting of the show"–marching bands. "When the drums came about, that was sort of an all-in idea." Stephens experimented with the vast array of styles and approaches to drumline, contrasting the broader, more aggressive marching band sound with, say, samba (which required whistles, shakers, and other lighter percussive instruments). A 25-person drumline from a local high school came into the studio to improvise, producing much of the eventual sound of the show, an experience Stephens remembers fondly: "They had never really been in a studio before."

By the time filming actually began in 2015, Stephens had built up an archive of pieces designed to communicate variations on the Vice Principals vibe, which ended up influencing both shooting and the editing booth. One of Stephens' proudest contributions to the series is the musical accompaniment to a slow-motion shot of Gamby being hit in the face with a chunk of meatloaf, a moment repeatedly highlighted in the show's trailers. Like much of the eventual music for the series, however, it had been written before filming began.

In the show's second episode, Gamby and Russell destroy Belinda's house, first smashing everything in sight, then finally setting the building on fire. It's a literal barn-burner of a scene, requiring jerky escalation and a sense of encroaching disaster. Stephens breaks it down: "That scene has a lot of everything. It starts out with drums, with a lot of quiet rim shots and things like that, then evolves into this full-blown electro, aggro, in-your-face thing. Then it turns into creepy horror music as the house turns into flames."

But, characteristic of the entire Vice Principals musical process, none of the music was composed for the scene–the show's editing team stitched the full sequence together from Stephens' archive. "There were a few different pieces of music that were put in that weren't really specific to a scene," he says.

Seeing the final product of the house-burning scene was the moment Stephens realized what we can see, a couple of weeks into its run–the musical direction of the series is working. The clash between the excitement and disgust produced by Gamby and Russell is at the heart of the series, and Stephens manages to contain both in the same musical bottle. Is it possible for Vice Principals–and for Stevens–to top an extended sequence of arson, destruction of property, and uninhibited, gleeful malevolence? We'll just have to keep watching.