
A deluxe version of the soundtrack, with remix versions of "Sunflower" and "Scared of the Dark" as bonus tracks, was released on February 22, 2019. It was released by Republic Records on December 14, 2018, the same day as the film's theatrical release. The soundtrack was supported by the singles " Sunflower" and "What's Up Danger". But where soundtrack tunes so often indulge in the audio-production equivalent of pyrotechnics, some of Spider-Verse’s best songs triumph for the exact opposite reason-Vince Staples’ closer, “Home,” and Swae Lee and Post Malone’s “Sunflower” ride the lowest of lo-fi beats to really let their lyrics shine.The soundtrack features songs performed by an array of artists, including XXXTENTACION, Juice WRLD, Vince Staples, Jaden Smith, Nicki Minaj, Lil Wayne, Ski Mask the Slump God, Ty Dolla $ign, Post Malone, Swae Lee, Anuel AA, and Thutmose. And Nicki Minaj turns up the patois over Caribbean vibes on “Familia”-a rare song that directly references the film-alongside verses from Puerto Rican trap artist Anuel AA and Zimbabwean singer Bantu.

Lil Wayne and Juice WRLD each offer introspective tracks (the former featuring a surprise appearance from the late XXXTENTACION) that use literal darkness as a metaphor for emotional pain. LA MC DUCKWRTH’s “Start a Riot” is a jump-up-on-the-table party-rap rager. While these songs were written for the movie, they often don’t sound like movie songs in the conventional sense.

So it makes sense that the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse-which features multiple cross-racial, cross-gender, cross-generational, cross-dimensional characters with Spidey powers-has a soundtrack that really upends the franchise’s own long-established aesthetic and cultural awareness. But surveying it 16 years later, there was something awfully homogenous about its lineup: Sum 41, Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger, Theory of a Deadman, Aerosmith, Pete Yorn. There was nothing necessarily wrong with the soundtrack to 2002’s Tobey Maguire-starring Spider-Man.
