The White Lotus theme tune is now the hottest song on TikTok

Everyone is obsessed with the White Lotus theme song.

The show has its fair share of fans too - charting the lives of miserable rich people holidaying in Sicily, employing as much comedy as intrigue with a tense murder mystery plot - what's not to like?

But the show's song itself, Renaissance, has become a breakout star, inspiring countless memes on Twitter and going viral on TikTok. It has even been played in clubs by the likes of Dominic Fike.

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The show’s soundtrack for series one won Emmys for both Outstanding Music Composition and Outstanding Main Title Theme Music in the same year.

Composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer told Buzzfeed: “There was an article somewhere talking about the theme and how it’s done and how it appears that it was almost designed to be a hit on TikTok.

“It's just funny because I'm not really aware of that stuff.”

“It feels like it's club-friendly already. It feels like a party and just an all-out celebration,” he added.

“When the beat drops, we're going through those chords. It feels big to me. It feels very emotional and like we’re getting into a journey.”

Edward Venn, Professor of Music at Leeds University told GQ the song: “continually offers up reassuringly familiar ideas, only to pull the rug from out of us and to turn it into something uncomfortable.

“So there’s that opening piano figure, conjuring up memories of classical music and grace. But from the start, it’s not quite settled: the rhythms have the irregular insistence of, say, John Carpenter’s theme to Halloween," Venn said.

“And the chord progression that follows recalls [British composer] John Murphy’s favourite harmonic sequence to generate a sense of foreboding, heard in 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Kick-Ass, as well as evoking the opening of The Haunting of Hill House.”

"It’s the way that the initial minor chord moves to the major – offering a sense of hope, of respite – only for it to slide back, continually and unstoppably, to the threatening implications of that minor chord. From the outset the theme is deeply unsettling.”

The opera singer evokes “the glitz and glamour of classical music; familiar, too, in the way her melody recalls the theme tune of season 1 of The White Lotus”. But viewers can never get too comfortable, because “a wavering, electronically generated version of the tune pitches us deep into the uncanny valley: it’s neither human nor non-human, but uncomfortably between the two”.

Venn added the bass's “insistent pounding, in parallel with increasingly insistent percussion, combines with distorted melody and threatening chord progressions - and an added layer of distorted atonal noises - carry the theme, and all its uncanny, foreboding qualities, to a powerful close”.

All episodes of the White Lotus have aired and are available on HBO.

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