Inspired by a number of conversations between director Yann Demange and music producer David Holmes, the majority of '71's score was created before the film was shot. Musically influenced by John Carpenter's Assault from Precinct 13 and Escape from New York, John Paul Jones' "Four Minute Warning" and Tony Conrad's "The Pyre of Angus Was in Kathmandu," the music pulses with the tension and potential terror of war-torn Belfast streets in 1971. "Holding it all together is David Holmes' terrific score, chiming guitars and drums hovering over a rubble-bed of sampled sounds and remodulated chords, plaintive melodies emerging from a bedrock of discord and disquiet... Demange uses Holmes' eerie score (to which he listened on set) to generate both growing tension and weirdly uncanny unease." Mark Kermode; "A terrific soundtrack by David Holmes which ratchets up the tension and gives you this sense that things are eerie, things are uncanny, things are slightly out of wack." Kermode and Mayo's Film Review.