Ahead of the season two premiere of “Stranger Things,” Spotify has pulled out a few tricks to hype you for the show.
If you log on to the streaming app and listen to the official “Stranger Things” soundtrack for season one or season two, after a few seconds, your screen will transform into the Upside Down, turning cloudy, with those spooky snowflakes flittering across the screen, images of that gooey muck peeking out from the corners, and a spotlight projecting from the song bar.
This element is kinda fun, as though Spotify has temporarily turned into a musical haunted house. I mean, I’ll take all the spooky vibes I can get, October’s almost over.
But the real feature is the playlists — 13, each themed after major characters in the show. If you visit spotify-strangerthings.com, Spotify uses one of their spooky algorithms to match you up with one of the characters from the show, based on your musical preferences. For whatever reason, I matched with the new girl in the gang, Max, kid sister to the new Bad Dude, Billy, (Dacre Montgomery). I feel ‘meh’ about her as a character (it’s not her fault, she’s unfairly positioned as Eleven’s mediocre successor), but her playlist, Max’s Sk8 Sessions, is definitely worth a listen with retro punk poppy hits like Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun,” Sonic Youth’s “Teenage Riot.”
If you don’t love the playlist you’re matched up with, you can still listen to any of the 13. Queue ’em all up and you’ve got your Halloween party playlist. The names, along with the tunes, are pretty great — like Joyce’s Halloween House (The Hollies’ “Witchy Woman,” and the classic Bobby “Boris” Pickett & the Crypt-Kickers version of “Monster Mash”), Eleven’s Breakfast Jams (Madonna’s “Papa don’t Preach,” Lorde’s “Buzzcut Season”), Demogorgons’ Upside Downers (Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People,” Kanye West’s “Monster”), Dustin’s Curiosity Door Jams (Hall & Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That,” The Doors’ “Break on Through to the Other Side”).
If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the season 2 trailer, below. The show returns to Netflix on Friday, Oct. 28.
