The music Nathan Micay writes for Industry acts as the show’s nervous system. “My job is to listen. Then I try to turn all that noise into something worthwhile.”Nyima Chatelain/Supplied
Two women sit across from each other at a table that costs more than a month’s rent. They’re not quite enemies yet – but give it time. On one end is Harper Stern, a high-stakes finance operator – all talent and cutthroat ambition. On the other, Yasmin Kara-Hanani, money-raised and manicured, every inch the polished daughter of power she’s been trying not to be.
Harper made a move behind Yasmin’s back, and now they’re both pretending it’s still a conversation.
Their back-and-forth exchange stretches on before curdling into something openly cruel. Yasmin goes first: “I used to think we could love each other in spite of the worst things we thought about each other. Turns out, maybe not.”
Harper begins her rejoinder with, “Yes, you are talentless and useless,” and ends it with a string of profanities unsuitable for print.
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Cue the slap. Then another.
It’s the kind of scene HBO’s high-finance series Industry has refined over multiple seasons – no music swelling or camera tricks, just a cold tongue-lashing played straight. Still, the Season 3 moment in the “Nikki Beach” episode isn’t all slights. Beneath the insults, almost as if the body registers it before the ears, a low hum of strings settles into the background. Menacing, it arrives just before palms meet cheeks, then pivots into upbeat synthesizers.
The other character here, of course, is the music.
A native Torontonian, Micay found his artistic footing in Berlin as a DJ and even as a personal trainer.Nyima Chatelain/Supplied
The score for Industry is composed by Toronto-raised, Berlin-based electronic artist Nathan Micay, and it functions like the show’s nervous system quietly transmitting anxiety, momentum and threat. He’s also scored other television projects, including the Peacock spy thriller The Copenhagen Test, but Industry remains his most sustained and visible work in narrative television.
Micay’s approach to Industry draws from late-1970s and ’80s electronic futurism, filtered through Berlin club minimalism. Early seasons rely on arpeggiated synths and sub-bass; in the current fourth season, drums begin to enter the mix.
“It’s such a dense show,” Micay says. “So I really only focus on the scenes I have to work on. With the argument scene, whenever we have these heavy sub-bass rolling things like that, the idea is just like, the world is ending for these characters.”
For a show as relentless as Industry, that density is by design. When it came to the HBO/BBC co-production, Micay’s task was to establish the sonic palette of institutional power and financial pressure. Industry is, after all, a study in contrasts: at turns a fluorescent-lit workplace drama and a far-reaching social commentary about ambition, as if Succession met Game of Thrones by way of finance.
It’s also a story about damaged people under pressure – characters who speak in acronyms during the day, like FICC (Fixed Income, Currencies and Commodities) or FX (foreign exchange), who then burn off stress through hedonistic exploits by night. Much of that pressure concentrates around Harper Stern, played by the mononymous Myha’la, whose distance from old money and institutional safety nets sharpens the stakes.
Before Micay ever met the show’s creators, he’d already been circulating through Industry’s early drafts. Mickey Down and Konrad Kay had been listening to his music as they developed the series, seduced by its synth-forward unease; one track from Micay’s 2019 album Blue Spring – the title track – even slipped in as a placeholder.
Then came the call in February, 2020: Could he fly to London the next day?
At their first meeting, Micay was asked what score came to mind during a test episode. “I said Risky Business – Tangerine Dream,” he recalls. “And they were like, that was exactly the right answer.”
Down and Kay framed Industry as a show about “kids on a trading floor that, for the most part, is the colour grey.” A sterile environment, everyone dressed to conform. “So how can we make that exciting?” Micay remembers thinking.
His answer was kinetic music: fast, propulsive, alive. For these characters, pressure wasn’t a burden; it was a thrill. “For them,” Micay says, “this is hopefully going to be, like, exciting and fun.”
Micay’s ear for pressure was shaped long before Industry, in a Toronto home where music was constant rather than precious. His mother taught school music; his father filled the house with jazz. As a kid, Micay gravitated toward Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and the Backstreet Boys. The Mighty Ducks score, he says, was one of the few times he became truly aware of how music could shape a story: “I remember specifically rewinding the VHS tape we had just to listen to little short snippets of score.”
At Queen’s University, where he studied history with plans for law school, film scoring was already the long game. After graduating, he moved to Berlin, landing in what he describes as “a very small fish in a very big pond.” For years, DJ work barely paid the bills. To stay afloat, he went from cleaning dishes to carving out an unlikely niche as a personal trainer for DJs, working entirely through word-of-mouth.
“It took quite a few years for me to really find my footing,” he says, “make friends, make connections.”
For Micay, scoring became an escape from the image economy that hardened around club culture. “With film scoring and TV scoring, you have to do the job,” he says. “If you can’t do the job, it’s not going to work out, no matter how good you are at marketing yourself.”
On Industry, that work starts long before a note is written, in what he calls spotting sessions – mapping scenes, cues and tone. “It would be impossible for me to just jump in and work without having an idea of what everyone wants,” he says.
By the fourth season, Micay wasn’t just scoring the show’s anxiety; he was helping to shape its movement. Each episode still begins with what he half-jokingly calls “10-minute therapy sessions” with Down and Kay – early conversations where tone, pressure and intent are stress-tested before a single note is written.
“There are so many voices,” Micay says, from directors to producers. His role is to translate that noise into something coherent.
One early Season 4 moment captures that shift: an acid-soaked dinner party involving Henry, played by Kit Harington, scored with pounding drums inspired by Akira and Ghost in the Shell, colliding against aristocratic excess and general awkwardness. It’s part of a broader evolution – more strings, more space, more cinematic weight – while remaining rooted in synth.
A later episode sends Sweetpea, played by Miriam Petche, on a mission, where Micay leans hard on drums and tension, pushing Industry beyond familiar banking anxiety and into something closer to paranoia.
If Industry is often described as a show about ambition, Micay, like the rest of its creative team, understands it as something more elemental: pressure, constantly accumulating, forcing everything into motion.
“My job is to listen,” he says. “Then I try to turn all that noise into something worthwhile.”
That’s Industry at work.
The full soundtrack album for Industry’s fourth season, composed by Micay, will be available in February on all streaming platforms.