Reunited 22 years later on the football field: Explosions in the Sky score "The Mosquito Bowl" — a 17-track soundtrack that reunites Peter Berg and Buzz Bissinger for the first time since "Friday Night Lights"

If you remember "Friday Night Lights," the film about Texas high school football, this lineup should make your heart beat a little faster. The soundtrack for the Netflix film "The Mosquito Bowl" was released digitally by Netflix Music on October 30. It runs 17 tracks and about 56 minutes, and the score comes from Texas post-rock band Explosions in the Sky.

The director is Peter Berg, and the source is Buzz Bissinger's nonfiction book "The Mosquito Bowl." Bissinger wrote "Friday Night Lights," Berg directed its 2004 film adaptation, and Explosions in the Sky provided music for that film. In other words, the author, the director and the band are back together on another American football story. The film opened in select U.S. theaters on October 30 and is set to premiere on Netflix on November 25.

Christmas Eve on Guadalcanal: 64 men and a football game

The story is true. According to Bissinger's official website, on Christmas Eve 1944 the 4th and 29th Marine regiments played a football game on the dirt and coral of Guadalcanal. Sixty-four men took part. Many of them were college football stars, and fifteen of them were later killed on Okinawa. Berg co-wrote the script with Mark L. Smith ("The Revenant"), and the cast includes Nicholas Galitzine, Bill Skarsgård and Ray Nicholson.

Football and war. If "Friday Night Lights" was about boys carrying the pride of their town, this film is about young men with bright futures who leave them behind and go to war. Both are stories of the field, but they end up in very different places.

Line up the track titles and a map of the story appears

The track order tells you a lot. The album opens with "Last Games" (5:14), followed by "Pearl Harbor" and "Goodbyes," then the longest cue, "Transformations" (7:51). You can hear football players turning into soldiers in those first few tracks.

• First part: "Last Games," "Pearl Harbor," "Goodbyes," "Transformations," "Into Battle" — from everyday life to the front
• Middle: "Mosquito Bowl (Part 1)" and "Mosquito Bowl (Part 2)" — the title game sits at tracks 11 and 12, almost exactly in the center of the album
• Final part: "Okinawa," "Rescued," "Collecting Tags," "A Bomb," and finally "Returns" (5:16)

What stands out is that the game the film is named after is not the climax but the turning point. "Okinawa" follows the game, then "Collecting Tags." If you know the true story, the weight of a title about gathering dog tags is hard to take. Opening and closing with five-minute pieces, starting with "Last Games" and ending with "Returns," is exactly the kind of sequencing you would expect from a band that thinks in albums.

Why Berg keeps calling this band

Berg's connection to Explosions in the Sky goes beyond "Friday Night Lights." The band scored "Lone Survivor" (2013), set in Afghanistan, together with Steve Jablonsky. They also teamed up on the Netflix miniseries "American Primeval" (2025), and now they return to Netflix again.

The band's music has no vocals. It starts with quiet guitar arpeggios, builds layer by layer and finally crashes in like a wave: crescendo-style post-rock. Rather than telling the audience what to feel with a big orchestra, it waits for the feeling to grow inside the listener. That is probably why it suits Berg, who wants to show young men's glory and loss without spelling it out.

There is one more thing. For audiences in Japan, a track list with "Pearl Harbor" and "Okinawa" is also the history on the other side of this story. Hearing the same war through the eyes of young Americans, in the language of post-rock, should be a special experience. Before the Netflix premiere on November 25, start with the album and hear this reunion 22 years in the making.