Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story uses modern music to keep its 19th-century setting from becoming a sealed display case. That is the clearest reason its soundtrack matters: Netflix’s song choices make the past feel like material still being argued over, reimagined, and felt in the present. I read the playlist less as period authenticity than as a deliberate way to give an old story contemporary friction.
Content note: The series concerns the 1892 murders of Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother. This is a soundtrack-focused editorial based on Netflix’s official materials, not a firsthand review of the episodes or a judgment about the historical case.
Modern songs are the point, not a mistake
Netflix identifies the eight-episode, TV-MA drama as the fourth installment of its Monster anthology. The season centers on Borden, who was accused of the 1892 murders of her father and stepmother, while its story also moves among Borden, Elizabeth Báthory, and Aileen Wuornos. That is an unusually large historical and cultural frame for a period-set series. A score that only chased Victorian texture could make that frame feel safely distant. The soundtrack instead brings in music from radically different eras and scenes.
Netflix’s official guide lists The Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb,” Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love,” Wet Leg’s “mangeout,” Lambrini Girls’ “Cuntology 101,” Jefferson Airplane’s “Today,” The Doors’ “The End,” Chromatics’ cover of “I’m On Fire,” Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy,” Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s “The Last Time,” and Natalie Merchant’s “Carnival.” That is not one stable musical mood. It moves among punk, post-punk, indie rock, classic rock, pop, and orchestral rearrangement.
The formal point is confirmed by co-showrunner Ian Brennan, who told Netflix that the production did not want the period piece to feel like a diorama. I take that as the key to hearing the playlist. The songs do not ask viewers to pretend that the story is preserved behind glass; they push the show toward a more unsettled relationship with memory, spectacle, gender, danger, and myth.
A playlist with productive collision
The most interesting quality of this selection is its refusal to smooth those differences away. The Runaways, Bronski Beat, Kate Bush, and Wet Leg arrive from distinct musical histories, each carrying its own associations for listeners. Their presence next to 1960s rock and a Chromatics cover creates a kind of temporal collage. The soundtrack can make a Victorian narrative feel less like a finished chapter and more like a cultural object repeatedly reinterpreted by later generations.
That is editorial interpretation, not a claim that any individual song has been assigned a fixed meaning or a particular character. Netflix’s guide establishes that the tracks appear in the series; it does not support a scene-by-scene account of why each cue is used. I would resist turning a playlist into secret character psychology without creator confirmation. Its broader effect is already legible: the mix gives the show access to musical languages that would be impossible in a strictly period-correct sound world.
That choice also changes how a viewer might approach the title’s historical distance. A familiar song can bring private associations; a confrontational new one can interrupt expectations. In either case, anachronism reminds us that the act of revisiting a notorious story is contemporary. The series is not simply returning to 1892. It is presenting a modern retelling of a figure whose name has remained culturally charged.
Why this belongs in the Music conversation
Soundtrack writing often gets reduced to a list of songs, as though recognition were the whole achievement. Here, the list is more useful as evidence of a curatorial position. The guide’s range suggests a production willing to let several decades of popular music rub against one another instead of offering a single, nostalgic “period” palette. I find that tension more revealing than any one needle drop.
It also makes the soundtrack a bridge between the series’ subject and the anthology’s larger method. Netflix describes the season as moving among three women from different periods. The modern songs are one way to keep that structure from reading as an antique pageant. They encourage an audience to consider how notorious women are turned into stories, symbols, warnings, and entertainment across time.
What the soundtrack cannot settle
The playlist cannot answer historical questions about the Borden case, and it should not be treated as evidence about the real people involved. Nor can it tell us, on its own, whether the finished season handles violence or its subjects responsibly. I have not watched the episodes firsthand, so I am not offering a performance review, a scene analysis, or a verdict on the series. This is a reading of the official soundtrack information and the stated creative intent behind it.
Within that boundary, the music is still worth noticing. Brennan’s diorama comment gives the anachronism a clear purpose, and the selected artists make that purpose audible. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story appears to use pop history as a live wire: a way of saying that a Victorian story can still feel unstable when it is heard through songs that belong to later cultural arguments.
Netflix reported on Sept. 22 that the season debuted at No. 1 on its English TV list with 12.1 million views. That is a one-week, Netflix-reported measure, not independent proof of cultural impact. But it does mean the soundtrack’s choices are entering a large current conversation. For music-minded viewers, the worthwhile question is not whether the songs are historically accurate. It is what their inaccuracy is designed to make newly present.
Sources
- Netflix Tudum: “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Soundtrack: Every Song in the New Season” (Sept. 17, 2026)
- Netflix Tudum: “Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story Is Now Streaming” (Sept. 17, 2026)
- Netflix: Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story official title page
- Netflix Tudum: “Top 10 Movies and Shows on Netflix: Week of September 14, 2026” (Sept. 22, 2026)
