Industry begins with Harper, a raw American upstart from a non-target school, interviewing for a coveted placement at Pierpoint & Co. an investment bank where she is taken under the wing of Eric, a grizzled veteran who appreciates her bravado and glibly justifies the hurdles inherent to keeping her around, saying “every successful business is full of people who spent money nurturing unremarkable talent.” If Toronto-born composer Nathan Micay hadn’t been privy to a more kindhearted version of that conversation with a professor who had the presence of mind to steer him down the right path, his musical score likely wouldn’t have under-girded HBO’s hit series and he’d be a lawyer instead—I’m glad we’re one lawyer short.
The fictional world of Pierpoint, is just a slice of the massive commerce that flows in and out of London’s bustling financial sector, but to the young graduates vying for permanent places behind their Bloomberg keyboards, it is everything. The show is as much an indictment of work as the sole determinant of identity, as it is one that celebrates the uniqueness of the grads that surrender themselves to the cause of enriching their employers. Harper struggles just as much with a traditional bean-laden English breakfast as she does with adjusting to a toxic work culture that is at once hard to digest but equally difficult to look away from as a viewer.
Pierpoint, as with all established institutions in time-honoured professions, is stodgy in its adherence to tradition. Rob, a loutish geography grad who lacks the savvy to take the collar stays out of his shirt, is admonished by his superiors as resembling Neo from The Matrix in his black Ted Baker suit; having already mastered the banker wardrobe of Ferragamo loafers and neutral navy tailoring, they can laugh, but Rob is crestfallen at having been made a fool of. Intent on making it through their six-month stints having made favourable impressions, the graduates abuse Adderall for work purposes, ketamine for social purposes, and emotionally abuse each other simply because that’s what they see their seniors doing. Behind all of this is Micay’s distinctive electronic score, rendering each already tense moment in a show full of them even more fraught with turbulence with its mournful/life-affirming synths and sparse, but well-placed percussion.
Showrunners Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, themselves Oxford grads who absconded finance gigs to pursue TV writing, tout Micay’s score as “propulsive, muscular music that also tears your heart out. It’s the absolute centrepiece of everything,” on the blurb wrapping the vinyl copy of the score and I’d be hard-pressed to disagree with them. James Harris from the popular podcast Throwing Fits has put it equally as viscerally in a tweet: “i havent done mdma in a minute but whipping an ebike over the wburg bridge with the industry original score in my headphones certainly felt familiar.”
Having grown obsessed with the sweeping melodrama of the show in the wake of a breakup that saw me use the music as a motivational study drug, I made it my mission to track Micay down at the expense of keeping up with my Securities lectures for a conversation about how the electronic producer had turned his attention to composing.
When Micay answered my Zoom call from his Berlin apartment a stone’s throw away from famed club, Berghain, a grin quickly crept across his face. Micay’s knowing smile was at my purple Pierpoint hoodie, a knockoff modelled after the one Eric briefly wore in the show which fans promptly lusted after. We chatted about its subreddit origins and the universe of unofficial merch the show has spawned before diving into things.
Pierpoint & Co. might not always take care of everyone’s fortunes in the best way — be it their malleable young employees or their cagey high-profile clients — but they’ve certainly helped Micay’s as the Berlin-based producer will attest. As laundry softly whirs in the background of his apartment, Micay airs his own figurative laundry at my prodding.
Music was ever-present in the Micay household, with his mother a since-retired high school music teacher, and his father a devout listener of Thelonious Monk. While the paterfamilias might have enjoyed jazz, Micay was far from a fan and instead favoured bluegrass, picking up instruments like the mandolin, banjo, and guitar after childhood stints playing the piano and viola.
Growing up in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, coincidentally one street over from the one I live on now, Micay has fond memories of playing ball hockey with friends on the grounds of Royal St. George’s College (a private school attended by musicians such as Noah Shebib aka 40 and Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham) when they were left open on weekends. With his musical talent, Micay was more suited for North Toronto Collegiate, a high school with a reputable string program. Upon graduation, Micay ventured three hours down the 401 to Queens University, where he studied history. When he wasn’t taking up issues of colonial law in the American colonies, Micay spent his time in the gym, finding the social life at the school not his cup of tea. It was only there, amidst the relatively homogenous music scene, that he found himself disillusioned and drifting towards the electronic sound we recognize him for today. An exchange to England saw him get further exposure to the club scene, which livened him up to the possibility of pursuing music more seriously, but it also saw him suffer an injury that threatened that same dream. Getting jumped by a gang saw Micay suffer some excruciating head injuries that made making music all but impossible for his entire fourth year at age twenty-one.
Back in Canada and caught between pursuing his master’s in history with a view to attending law school and not letting the hype cycle for his music die out, Micay sought out one of his professors for advice. Wisely, they told him that law would always be there, while the window for opportunity for success in music was more fleeting. That was all Micay needed to hear to put his legal eagle dreams on the backburner in favour of playing festivals.
Striking a deal with his mother, Micay lived at home his first year out of university and worked part-time while further experimenting with his music. He then fortuitously made the move to London and then Berlin, where he currently resides. While the move to Germany befuddles his parents to this day, there is a method to Micay’s madness. With its claim to fame in part being its thriving electronic music scene, Micay has found a welcoming community in which to hone his craft. While getting his feet wet in the music scene, Micay saw another business opportunity- training his peers at the gym. With a DJ’s intense touring schedule taking a clear toll on mind and body, some peers began to look to the buff Micay for help with their amateur forays into weightlifting. The ad hoc operation ultimately spawned close to thirty regular clients, all of which were DJ’s who became closely entwined with Micay to the point where they were all regular fixtures at Micay’s birthday parties.
By 2019, Micay was in self-described “full on DJ lord mode,” touring heavily for most of the year at a frighteningly quick clip. In Australia when the pandemic hit, Micay had an about face and reckoned that he needed to shift gears to a more sustainable way of working, which has seen him lean entirely into scoring.
While Micay was acquainting himself with the inner facets of being a composer, the universe was working in his favour in a manner that begs one to recall the old saying: “the harder one works, the luckier one tends to get.” Although he had scored a slew of small Canadian indie films, Micay’s scoring oeuvre was still meagre compared to his production work, and it was from that overflowing bucket that Industry-creators Down and Kay drew from when they were in search of placeholder music for early work done on the show. The pair drew upon Micay’s 2019 album, Blue Spring, specifically the titular track which later became the show’s theme, with its hazy synths and propulsive drums immediately sucking them in.
Eventually, Micay was brought on board after an impromptu London interview with Kay and other HBO executives, after which he got to work immediately. Days were long and involved spotting sessions, where the team took a collaborative approach to marking out timecodes in the script where music would be needed, with abstract notes about what mood Micay should seek to strike or simply heighten. While those initial sessions were collaborative, Micay then had a lot of leash, but little time, in which to slot something that worked into the scene. Drafts would then get sent back and forth before an episode became “locked” meaning Micay could stop worrying about it.
On a personal level, Micay found relating to the cast easy. Harper, the aforementioned American grad played by Myha’la Herrold, was the fish out of water that Micay saw himself in, having lived in England and Germany on his own. The scenes in which Harper walks around London with bated breath, not daring to believe her situation was real, were ones Micay took special pleasure in scoring, recognizing that “everything’s exciting, everything’s new, you’re completely lost, trying to make new friends and while there’s a melancholy nature to that, it’s also unbelievably exciting.”
While things moved at a fast pace, Micay’s efforts also took several permutations before ending up as the finished product. “Country Club Henries” for instance, started off with drums layered around Eric’s impassioned raging, but that quickly percolated into something angrier with “sub-bass and weird sounds” to mirror the banker’s own public outburst while brandishing a bat in the middle of the office.
My profuse thanks for tracks like “Don’t Speak to the Press (For My Love)” and “Harper’s Morning Pitch” (which I regularly shed tears to while feeling overly sorry for myself trudging down lamp-lit Palmerston in the wake of my breakup) were met with thanks and an admonition that he’d been similarly regaled with praise from a whole cadre of people outside his usual listenership who’d used his music to soar heights like getting into business school and attaining MBA’s. Decidedly more modest, Micay opts to vacuum to some of the Industry cuts.
Although his lips were sealed on the topic of the second season, Micay was visibly excited for the project to be in front of the public at last, after putting in work to keep on fine-tuning his sound. When I mentioned how his Industry score had supplanted Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score for The Social Network in my studying rotation, Micay laughed and mentioned how he’d been listening to it of late to see how he could improve. He also was quick to diffuse any insistence on my part that such work was unnecessary; while he might not be as cutthroat about his ambitions as the characters whose lives he scores, Micay needs no inspiration to keep honing his craft, saying “I’m an immigrant to a foreign land, I can’t stop striving.”
With his landlord wanting his current space back and the tide shifting in the Berlin real estate market, Micay is unsure of where he’ll land next (I hope it’s back in the Annex), but my guess with season two on the way is that it’ll be firmly on his feet composing some of the most exciting music on TV today.