You’ve likely heard Bobby Krlic’s sound, even if you don’t immediately recognize his name.
It’s unnerving, the music Krlic creates – a sonic mélange of oppressive bass and teeth-clenching drone metal that brews a heady mixture of dreamy hypnosis and sinister pandemonium. Krlic’s melodies are the sort that belong in horror movies, building an audible sense of dread as main characters unwittingly confront death or the demonic… or Swedish cults.
It’s a good thing then that the musician, producer, and composer can count director Ari Aster as a fan. The pair connected on Aster’s recent horror hit Midsommar, with Krlic crafting the movie’s soundtrack and scoring some of the most unsettling images we’ve seen on film in a long time.
But he didn’t begin his career expecting to match wailing strings and orchestral wind instruments to stories about unlucky tourists. In fact, he can chart his love affair with music to his early childhood. Krlic remembers having a guitar in his hand by age six. His parents, both musicians, encouraged him to follow his artistic passions. He played in different bands in high school and, by the time he reached college, he knew that music was what he wanted to study and perfect. Even then, however, Krlic wasn’t sure there’d be a space for his experimental sound.
“I kind of imagined that the music I made was probably too strange,” Krlic tells us. But that didn’t stop him from pursuing it. In fact, it made him that much more determined to forge his own path in the industry, reaching out to production houses and eventually dropping his own album under the stage name The Haxan Cloak.
“I’ve always had an attitude of, if somebody says no, I’ll just keep trying until somebody eventually says yes,” he explains.
Eventually, people did start to say yes. A lot.
Krlic has produced music for everyone from Troye Sivan to Khalid. In 2013, he got a call from famed film composer Atticus Ross to work on scoring a couple of movies, which led to work crafting the sound of popular TV shows like Snowpiercer and The Alienist. He’s released more music under The Haxan Cloak, and his work with Aster on Midsommar has earned him plenty of acclaim – and an Ivor Novello award.
To hear Krlic talk about his wholly original sound is to hear an artist testing his own limits. He often refers to music as simply “a conversation” and he sees his role as a composer in a very serviceable, almost utilitarian way.
“I see music and art and culture as just this ongoing conversation, one that I would love to, in any small way, keep contributing to and keep pushing forward,” Krlic says. “I try and concern myself with something that I want to see or hear, that I’m not seeing or hearing currently. That doesn’t mean that it has to be this grandiose thing, it just means no one’s doing that like I want to.”
He’s built his own sonic style by staying true to his creative instincts, even if that means challenging the status quo and breaking some rules. Actually, when it comes to Krlic’s music, it’s about breaking all the rules. That, in part, is why being chosen as one of The Next 9 by Porsche seems to humble him so much. When asked what that kind of recognition means for his art, he’s quiet, thoughtful, and intentional with an answer.
“Being part of The Next 9, I think what we’re really talking about is a shift of the culture,” Krlic begins. “I think it’s people who are not concerned with the here and now, they’re just concerned with what’s next and what hasn’t been seen yet.”
Krlic’s urge to create art that defies convention isn’t about earning clout for himself as a musician and composer. Being noticed by a brand like Porsche is flattering of course, but his deeper desire is to inspire more artists to embrace the things that make them original and make their art meaningful.
“You can be utterly true to yourself and you can still resonate with people,” Krlic says. “I view music, art, film, culture, and fashion as a way of bringing people together and asking questions. That’s what I hope I’m doing.”
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