Did the Duffers give you references from music of the period they wanted to evoke?

KYLE DIXON Nothing too strong, really. If they wanted to use a Tangerine Dream song, they did. It’s in there as temp [music synced with rough footage as a place holder for the score], and we hear it and we’re like, “That’s great, just use that, there’s no point in us trying to make something better than that because it already works.”

MICHAEL STEIN When we would get some temp, you might even get a playful, little sad piano piece at times, and we knew that’s not what they wanted. And they’re like, “We don’t really know what we wanted.” [It was] just something that was mood-evoking.

DIXON A lot of times, at least initially, we weren’t being weird enough. Especially as the season progresses, and things start to get weirder, we would try to do a more straightforward music, in our style, but it just didn’t have the same impact that a really bizarre, atonal, rhythmic thing would have.

When you got scenes, how much time would you have to turn something in?

STEIN Sometimes it would be like, “Hey, we need these four cues tomorrow, because we’re going to premiere it to the Netflix production team that’s up above us, and they have to sign off on everything.”

DIXON “Execs want to see it, we need these scenes in there by tomorrow,” and then we’d be working all night.