“Game of Thrones” has a way of turning everyday citizens into dragon-repping dweebs who, for instance, wouldn’t think twice about dropping serious coin in order to shout “bum-bum ba-da bum-bum” in a basketball arena while an orchestra plays the TV show’s theme song. Untold thousands did just that across the last few years, as part of the continent-spanning “Game of Thrones” Live Concert Experience tour (tagline: “MUSIC IS COMING”). Even rappers, indie rockers, and pop stars who hinge their careers on being cooly above-it-all aren’t immune. Since the fantasy saga first aired in 2011, everyone from the National to Big Boi to Ed Sheeran has pledged their fealty in some form or another.
With For the Throne—which includes 14 songs inspired by “Game of Thrones,” none featured in the actual show—a host of additional musicians from across the pop spectrum add their names to that list. But instead of using this synergistic platform to have a little fun with the bloodiest, horniest, soapiest epic of our time, For the Throne is annoyingly dour and stone-faced. If this album were a character on “Game of Thrones,” it would be unceremoniously stabbed to death within five minutes.
For the Throne was steered in large part by Grammy-nominated hitmaker Ricky Reed, who served as an executive producer and helped write and record more than half of the album. Known for his work with acts like Maroon 5, Meghan Trainor, and Phantogram, Reed has proven himself in the music industry by churning out the sort of bright, soul-adjacent pop that so often serves as ambient capitalist lube. He’s an odd fit for a project based on “Game of Thrones,” a show defined by existential dread, gallows humor, and the canny subversion of mythic tropes. But he’s also musically amenable to his surroundings. So most of For the Throne ends up in a greyscale dead zone, sounding like a simulacra of moodiness to be algorithmically filtered in with all the other sad pop currently weighing down charts and playlists.
This means country-pop star Maren Morris and dance-pop star Ellie Goulding are miscast as brooders wallowing about sold souls and hollow crowns. (For a more believably ominous recent hit about the spectre of absolute queendom, try Billie Eilish’s “you should see me in a crown.”) Reed has marginally better luck when he works in some slick soul touches on sync-core faves X Ambassadors’ “Baptize Me,” which also highlights guest vocalist Jacob Banks’ deep rasp, and “X Factor” winner James Arthur’s barn-stomp ballad “From the Grave,” though both would likely make more sense in a reboot of Disney’s Sword in the Stone than the incest-laden, quasi-medieval apocalypse allegory at hand. “From the Grave” is a long-distance love song seemingly sung from the perspective of Jon Snow, the reluctant hero who was once magically resurrected. But it’s actually more fun to think of lines like “Bury me and lock me in/I’ll find a way to rise again” as something growled out by a skeletal wight, the evil zombies of the “Thrones” universe. Undead flesh eaters have feelings too, right?
In an interview with Billboard, Reed mentioned that he purposefully didn’t include too many obvious references to “Thrones” on the album. “These artists are all cool and they don’t want to say corny shit,” he said. “They want to make songs that stand on their own.” One problem: Pretty much all of these songs do not stand on their own. Also, the whole idea of an album inspired by “Game of Thrones” is inherently goofy—so why not really own it by showing off your Westerosian bona fides?! On this front, credit is due to Joey Bada$$, who lets his nerd flag fly on the A$AP Rocky collaboration “Too Many Gods” with footnote-friendly bars including, “Playing with fire but I’m no Targaryen,” and, “Bit the flow harder than Valyrian Steel.” (The lines could have found a place in Coldplay’s “Game of Thrones: The Musical” send-up from 2015, which is entirely more enjoyable than this album.) The Weeknd tries to trace Jon Snow’s plight in a limp, fake-Yeezus-style track with SZA and Travis Scott, “Power Is Power,” but his verse ultimately comes off more like just another huffy ode to the singer’s own pop star persecution complex. Elsewhere, the songs on For the Throne are so vague that you have to wonder if certain artists have ever even sat through one full episode of the show.
There are moments when the music here comes close to matching the shadowy “Game of Thrones” mood millions have fallen for. “Me Traicionaste,” by the strikingly original Spanish singer Rosalía, offers a dark, piercing sensuality. The song could feasibly soundtrack a murderous betrayal in a Dornish brothel, though its spell is ruined by a pointless, 18-second verse from Peruvian singer A.Chal, who barges in with: “I take my time when I see her coming/I poke her face, but it’s no cards.” The late emo-rap icon Lil Peep, who was apparently a big “Thrones” fan, delivers a deranged hook that lives up to the show’s unflinching violence. “Stick that needle in my eye, just lost my peace of mind,” he bleats, sounding like one of teenage assassin Arya Stark’s pitiful victims. But these moments are rare, and they only serve to highlight what this strange artifact of monoculture runoff could have been.
