If there’s one thing Teenage Sex and Death with Camp Miasma has taught us, it’s that there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. With a title that dares you not to take it seriously, it then goes on to win the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Its soundtrack is a perfect accompaniment to a genre-blending mix of slasher meets horror-comedy meets psychological romance.

That blend of genres is exactly what you need to keep in mind when you’re going into the soundtrack, which drops on August 21st via Waxwork Records. The score is from Alex G, and this marks his third collaboration with director Jane Schoenbrun. Their partnership has a strong reputation to go with it following 2022’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and 2024’s I Saw the TV Glow. Schoenbrun’s whole motif behind their films is taking genre spaces like internet horror and trans coming-of-age and smuggling in real emotional stakes underneath. It works because they never treat the genre stuff as a joke, even when it is funny.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is doing the same, or at least on paper. The synopsis is about a young director (the incredibly talented Hannah Einbinder) hunting down the reclusive star of a dead slasher franchise (Gillian Anderson), and the two of them getting pulled into a “blood-soaked world of desire, fear, and delirium,” while being stalked by a spear wielding villain named – and I cannot stress this enough – Little Death.

Alex G is present throughout almost the entirety of the soundtrack, with nine of the fifteen songs being his, including a “Theme from Camp Miasma” that shows up three separate times (a standard version, a “Part 6,” and a closing reprise), like the idea keeps evolving instead of just repairing itself. The rest of his tracks fall more in line between “Slasher Fantasy” and “Slasher Climax,” sounding perfectly like they’re built for the horror payoff while bringing in “Dipping” and “What It Feels Like” for the quieter, more interior stuff.

If there’s one song that summarizes what this soundtrack is trying to do, it’s easily “Pain is the Heart of Love,” which pairs Alex G with Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile (yes, the Hats guy, arguably one of the most influential melancholic-pop records ever made). The lyrics from that track are apparently Schoenbrun’s own, not Alex G’s, which is especially exciting because it makes this less of a “composer writes a song for a movie” collaboration and even more of a direct collaboration between director and composer, with Buchanan as a vessel. The way the guitar layers and the orchestral flourishes intersect with Buchanan’s one of a kind vocal delivery make this a bittersweet view into the world of the film.

To bring even more superpower to Alex G’s score, you’ve got a run of needle-drops doing a lot of storytelling sheerly based on vibes alone: the soundtrack brings in R.E.M.’s “Supernatural Superserious,” Counting Crows’ “A Long December,” Donna Lewis’s “I Love You Always Forever,” Sally Shapiro’s “Anorak Christmas,” Andy Shauf’s “Satan,” and Okay Kaya’s “Nightswimming.” The placement is strategic and clever, Okay Kaya comes in right after the “Welcome to Camp” opener, while Counting Crows and R.E.M. land toward the back half, which I think feels like more of a move from disorientation towards resolve.

This isn’t just a backing music soundtrack either, Waxwork’s dropping Alex G’s complete score separately on September 11th, so two releases instead of one says a lot about how seriously the team behind the film and likely Alex G himself are taking this as a standalone body of work, not just as backing music to a film. The timing tracks too, Alex G is coming off Headlights, his 2025 major-label debut and tenth studio album.

Alex G has spent over a decade building a name on melodic songwriting that still sounds a little unpolished and impulsive on purpose, and that’s quietly shaped the whole lane of post-2010s indie and alternative music. A composer with a reputation like that, who is working with a director whose entire aesthetic is genre as a Trojan horse for sincerity, for the third time? That’s exactly the combo you’d expect to produce a soundtrack that refuses to pick between horror and heartbreak.

Whether that actually holds up once the needle drops, whether “Slasher Climax” and “Pain is the Heart of Love” genuinely bleed into each other or stay in their own lanes is something only the listener can answer, so on August 21st be sure to check out the soundtrack of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.

Order the soundtrack of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma HERE