Comes on clear vinyl LP + poster.
There’s a particular kind of pressure that comes with writing songs for a Lion King movie. You’re not just scoring a Disney prequel — you’re stepping into a lineage that includes Elton John, Tim Rice, Hans Zimmer and the towering vocal architecture of Lebo M, whose Zulu chants on “Circle of Life” became the most recognizable four seconds in modern animated cinema. So when Barry Jenkins handed Lin-Manuel Miranda the keys to Mufasa’s origin story, the assignment wasn’t just “write some bangers.” It was: don’t break the cathedral.
He didn’t break it. He renovated a wing.
Then comes the centerpiece, “I Always Wanted a Brother,” which Billboard clocked as the soundtrack’s runaway streaming hit (it cracked the UK Top 40 at #34). Co-written with composer Nicholas Britell — yes, the Succession guy, a Jenkins regular dating back to Moonlight — it’s a montage song doing four jobs at once: introducing the cubs (Braelyn Rankins and Theo Somulo), aging them up into Aaron Pierre and Kelvin Harrison Jr., establishing the brotherhood, and laying the harmonic groundwork for everything that comes after. Miranda has said he wrote it thinking about his own two sons, and the song carries that lived-in tenderness without tipping into syrup.
The wild card is “Bye Bye,” sung by Mads Mikkelsen as the antagonist Kiros. Miranda essentially talked Jenkins into letting him write a dancehall villain number that wasn’t in the original script, after watching old footage of Mikkelsen singing on Norwegian TV in his twenties. The result is genuinely strange — sinewy off-beat rhythm, menacing call-and-response with Joanna Jones and Folake Olowofoyeku — and it works precisely because it has no business working. It’s the most Miranda thing on the record: the guy who can’t stop genre-bending, even on the savanna.
“We Go Together” (a Miranda/Lebo M co-write) is the road-trip ensemble piece, doing structural work for the film’s romantic subplot, while “Tell Me It’s You” — the Aaron Pierre/Tiffany Boone duet that earned a 97th Academy Awards Best Original Song shortlist — is the closest thing here to a traditional Disney ballad. Restrained, harmonically generous, produced with a lot of air around the vocals. You can hear Mancina’s hand in the arrangement; nothing crowds the singers. Miranda doing what he does best, which is finding rhythmic and harmonic spaces nobody asked him to find, and Lebo M reminding everyone whose house this actually is.
