If Camille manages to resist the razor blade, it’s thanks to her other coping mechanisms: alcohol and music. In early episodes, Led Zeppelin is the house band in her beat-up car. Their cover of the blues standard “I Can’t Quit You Baby” blasts as she rolls into Wind Gap for the first time, likening the town to a lover who keeps you in their thrall even after destroying your happy family. Camille leaves one murdered girl’s funeral to “In the Evening,” a shapeshifting epic whose faint intro gives way to heavy riffage and sweaty grunts, before dissolving into a spacey instrumental passage, then ramping up to a raucous blues finale. This sequence of transitions is disorienting, like a rock show performed in a dream—or a drive through familiar streets you’d hoped never to see again.

Critics have dissected the Zeppelin syncs in perhaps excessive detail, and it’s easy to see why: The band is notoriously selective about licensing its songs, so it’s noteworthy that Jimmy Page and co. gave Jacobs four tracks to revisit throughout the miniseries. This rebellious music created by men known for treating women (and underage girls) terribly serves as a glimpse into the mind of a protagonist whose personality is a war between fierce independence and compulsive masochism. Even more important, as we learn in episode three, is that Zeppelin reminds Camille of Alice (Sydney Sweeney), a sort of surrogate Marian with whom she shared a room in rehab. Music isn’t a part of Camille’s life when she checks in, but through Alice she sees that it can be an escape from the depressing, windowless space they share. It is Alice’s iPod that Camille plays in the car; she has it now because Alice killed herself in rehab.

The Zeppelin syncs are an indication of the grief and guilt that have haunted Camille since her roommate’s death. But they’re only one piece of the collage Jacobs constructs. Something changes when Camille throws the iPod out of her car window at the end of episode three: Although she retrieves it early in episode four, a new era begins. Plant’s howl becomes less prominent. And in episode five, one of Camille’s contemporary picks opens and closes the miniseries’ most powerful hour, set at a racist, sexist celebration of the town’s history. The song, Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “Pa’lante,” has a jazzy, folky, all-American vibe, but singer Alynda Lee Segarra is a Nuyorican woman belting out a bilingual anthem for the oppressed. Its title is slang for “forward,” and though it doesn’t exactly lighten the show’s mood, it marks a moment when past tragedies loosen their grip and Camille shifts her attention to the present.

In Wind Gap, a town stuck in the mid-20th century, she seems to be the only adult with any awareness of current music. (Like so many hard drinkers, she also has LCD Soundsystem on her iPod.) Southern favorites like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Dolly Parton play in Camille’s bar of choice; at a Mexican watering hole, she’s surprised to find female folk singers from the 1960s on the stereo. Vickery (Matt Craven), a small-town police chief straight out of ’50s TV, favors Patsy Cline cassettes. By retreating to his own private musical Mayberry, he can ignore the mounting evidence that one of his neighbors is killing little girls.

Alan, the owner of that $112,000 sound system, also prefers the music of a bygone era. A self-styled sophisticate, he loves crooners, modern classical composers, and old film scores. A dreamlike montage at the end of episode four comes alive to sweeping string arrangements from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The theme from A Place in the Sun gets remixed in a different style for each episode’s opening credits. Alan also keeps a stash of kitschy jazz LPs with sexy girls on their covers.