You Lot Are Tripping Balls Over the New 'White Lotus' Theme Song

It has come to my attention, via social media and blogs, that a consensus is brewing: The theme for White Lotus Season 3, set in Thailand and tailored to the mood, is already hated and vilified. People are wondering, it seems, where the eerie toy piano and altered ooh-woo-ooohs are. I loved the Season 2 theme as much as anyone—it sounded like a chorus of scary cherubs baring their teeth on a Sunday night at Le Bain—but I am here to say the haters of the Season 3 theme song are tripping balls. It is good. 

Cristobal Tapia de Veer, the Chilean Canadian composer responsible for the White Lotus intro music, approaches his task brilliantly, tailoring them to the varying themes of each season but preserving elements of the original so it all remains of a piece. This is not unlike what show creator Mike White does with the scripts, and it’s generally what composers do when they are creating master works. 

Can you not see the vision? Our mans is making episodes of a symphony, pieced together over years, each with personality and something to say. It’s precisely why the ooh-woo-ooohs, so prominent in the first two seasons, do not exist in the third: If you’re watching the series, the Thai resort season is a critique of wellness and tranquility. Taking away the ooh-woo-ooohs is the equivalent of that Australian porter demanding the North Carolinian Ratliff family put their cell phones in a Faraday bag for safekeeping. You don’t hear them because you’re supposed to quell your internal voices and meditate, goddammit. Viewers are feeling their uncomfortable absence like the fear that creeps in when all our distractions are removed and we only have ourselves to contend with.

“It feels like an Eastern philosophy vibe could be interesting for White Lotus in Thailand,” Tapia de Veer said in a 2023 interview, before he’d begun working on the Season 3 theme. (He considered using a collection of Thai gongs he owns, but later seemed to decide the intro didn’t have to be so on the nose.) “I think that the best song I heard in the last few years that I can remember is people harmonizing to a cat on TikTok,” he said. Let’s just sit with our ego deaths for a moment. 

Tapia de Veer did reference the prior theme songs in this new one, which is titled “Enlightenment”: The general melody is shifted down into an ominous minor chord, and he brought in accordion and handclaps alongside a different kind of ooh vocals, chopped up and woozy-sounding. The most exciting bit comes about halfway through, when a chunk of electronic sub-bass drops in. It’s a dubstep trick, very Burial, and it unfurls into a bit of oonce-oonce. A dance music fan might expect a drop, a crescendo, or at least some kind of escalation, but instead it just stops, dissipating into an ambient synth ether that may or may not symbolize the higher goddamn consciousness, or maybe just whoever ends up dead at the end of the season. This shit is a masterpiece! Y’all are tripping!