Industry Season 4 opens with the camera stalking two characters that fans of the HBO show have never met before, while the Shep Pettibone remix of New Order’s “True Faith” plays. This particular song is marked by its pathos — lyrics that intertwine memories of trauma and fantasies of triumph — and shimmering ’80s synths on top of a threatening bass beat. It lures us into a late night in London where scrappy financial journalist Jim Dycker (Charlie Heaton) is trying to get close to potential source Hayley Clay (Kiernan Shipka).

From its start, Industry has used composer Nathan Micay’s club-inspired score and music supervisor Ollie White’s elite needle drops to pull viewers into a world that deifies sex, greed, and betrayal, but in Season 4, this sensory storytelling tapestry leveled up alongside the show itself. Industry pulled from everything from Baroque symphonic classics like Henry Purcell’s “Funeral for the Queen Mary” to Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo” to tell a story about global-scale fraud, the modern rise of fascism, and an Epstein-scale sex trafficking operation.

“We seem pathologically interested in blowing up the show season to season and seeing what we can do,” Industry co-creator and co-showrunner Konrad Kay told DECIDER last week. “If we break all the bones in its body, how we can sort of put it back together and make it bigger, better, more ambitious, have hopefully have more to say about its characters, its milieu, and capitalism, and all the sorts of things that we’re writing about.”

When Industry debuted back in 2020 — with a pilot directed by Lena Dunham — it focused in on a handful of recent college graduates trying to hack it in the cutthroat world of financial trading. Six years later, Industry has evolved into a star-studded drama that probes into all the major corridors of power — the government, the media, the markets —that propel the world on a global scale. The more Industry has expanded its scope, the larger its fandom has become. Industry Season 4 repeatedly saw leaps in viewership and earned the series some of its most rapturous praise to date. For the first time ever, HBO is throwing the extraordinary show into the awards conversation, and rightfully so.

So much of what makes Industry so excellent is what also makes it singular. There’s no other show that so effortlessly connects its characters’ perverse sexual kinks to the levers of power. There’s no other contemporary drama that manages to evoke the mood of picaresque classics like Barry Lyndon or Vanity Fair while still feeling completely of its time. And there’s no show on television that so seamlessly merges its storytelling with its sound.

In a conversation with DECIDER, Industry co-creator and co-showrunner Mickey Down called the relationship that he and Kay share with Nathan Micay and Ollie White as “pretty symbiotic” and born of a “shared, similar taste.” Micay was an “incredible electronic producer” who had never written film or television score before Industry, but “his style became the signature of the show in Season 1 and we can’t imagine making the show without him.”

According to Down, Micay explained in their first meeting that he was not only a DJ, but a proficient viola player. “He kind of can just do anything in any space,” Down said, including reworking classic English composers like Thomas Tallis and Ralph Vaughn Williams.

Down also explained that the “genesis of the music choices” that Ollie White helps assemble happen earlier with every season, from a sheer need for practicality.

“Sometimes when you’re picturing a scene, you get a song in your head and it really shapes the way that you write that scene,” Down said. “Also, we’re still quite a small show with a healthy, but reasonable, budget. So getting that stuff written down as early as possible means that Ollie [White] can then go and make the appropriate phone calls and get the best deal for the music.”

Down said that White isn’t just great at song selection, but selling the show to artists who would otherwise be well out of the show’s budget. Down chalked White’s salesmanship down to his passion for the show itself and his ability to “sell it as your song is going to be on a hopefully quite singular and strange show and it’s going to be a usage that is quite often quite unexpected.”

One artist used multiple times in Industry Season 4 is none other than the queen of new age Celtic mysticism, Enya. The elusive Irish artist’s music was used both as a joke and an emotional anchor in the most recent season.

“It was not lost on us that we were using her as hold music and then using her as emotional music in the same season,” Kay said.

“Quite honestly, when we were in the edit and we put ‘Only Time’ over that scene between Yasmin and Harper in the bar in Episode 7, our editor was like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this, guys?'” Down said. “Also, he made a joke. He was like, ‘What bar is playing like Enya into, like, Daft Punk?'”

The sequence Down is referring to sees Harper (Myha’la) and Yasmin (Marisa Abela) go from sharing an emotionally raw conversation that breaks down years of mutual jealousy to kissing on the dance floor as the aforementioned Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo” pulsates, isolating the two series leads in a world all their own. “Veridis Quo” was such an important part of this storytelling beat that Ollie White revealed to GQ that the show “had to sacrifice a few cues that were really hard to lose in order to get the budget for that.” Down not only confirmed this, but boasted about the deal that White managed to get for the track.

“It was one of the most expensive needle drops of the season, but a friend of mine who works for Atlantic, I was talking to him in LA when we were there doing the FYC [For Your Consideration] stuff. He was like, ‘God, you must have spent so much money.’ And he gave me a number and I was like, ‘It was less than half of that,'” Down said. “So again, credit to Ollie.”

“I don’t want to make Daft Punk think they got a bad deal, but it’s a credit to Ollie that he got that song for the price he did.” 

It’s also a credit to Industry that the scene hits so hard, giving the show’s two female leads what might be a dreamy last hurrah. In the very next episode, Harper and Yasmin’s friendship reaches a crisis point when Harper realizes, for perhaps the first time in the show’s run, she has a moral line she will not cross. Yasmin invites Harper to a high society dinner in Paris that is a covert assembly of wealthy European fascists angling to put a far-right politician in line for the Prime Minister seat. Even after clocking she’s dining with a bunch of racists, Harper is even more horrified to realize that Yasmin is acting as a madam for these men. She’s trafficking underaged girls and is pimping her former housemaid.

Kay explained that after the success of Industry Season 3, he and Down started to realized they had a roadmap for where the series would eventually end.

“What would be the most thrilling thing to do to the two main characters? Just ab initio? Like, where would you want them to land given where they started?” Kay said. “That question of morality that hangs over the whole show, it would be stupid for us not to take the two leads and have a transformational reckoning with that very question.”

Kay said they went back to the very beginning, to examine the “starkest contrast” between Harper and Yasmin. Sure enough, if you go all the way back to the series’ cold open, Harper expresses her belief that the world of finance is one of the few truly egalitarian systems to prove your worth, while Yasmin simply yearns for her voice to be heard in rooms of power.

“I think that good serialized TV writing is to say you change wholeheartedly, but the core DNA, the tell, is there from the very start,” Kay said. “If the building blocks are laid correctly, then there’s no faking the audience. You’re not pulling the wool over their eyes. You’re leading them on a journey where it feels satisfying if you were to go back and rewatch it.”

Down and Kay are currently in the middle of writing Industry‘s fifth and final season. “We know how it ends, which is crucial and which is kind of freeing as well,” Down said. “We’ve always risen to conclusions, but those conclusions have had a sort of small dash next to them. But this one is obviously a big, fat, full stop.”

Kay teased that the “moral lines” tied to how “Harper and Yasmin begin to react and change their relationship to money, success, around ascending the mountain” introduced in Season 4 aren’t going away in Season 5.

“The peaks and valleys of success totally change [you as a person] and your relationship to yourself changes across space and time,” Kay said. “Harper cannot be the same character once she gets the Tender win that she was when she was meeting Eric for the first time. Yasmin finally finds her political class and finds necessity and meaning through this class. She can’t be the same character.”

“That very question of like, ‘Who am I? Who do I want to be? And can I fundamentally change?’ I guess are the questions of the fourth and fifth season.”

Down admitted that it was “quite emotional” to conjure the “last images” we’ll get in Industry Season 5 in the writers room.

“It’s always a choice in a cynical show — or a show that purports to be cynical — with the romance at the edges, how much of that romance and hope do you actually reveal to the audience in these last moments?” Down said. “And how bitter a taste you want to leave them with?”

The long-time friends and collaborators shared that it felt “quite strange to be finally campaigning for Emmys in the fourth season” of Industry, but that they felt like it was proof of how much they, and the show, have transformed over that time.

“I don’t think we’d ever say that our own — well, I mean, maybe Mickey would — but I would never say our own show deserves recognition. I would say, like the acting. The acting definitely deserves recognition. It has from Season 1,” Kay said.

“As Konrad said, the first season, the pieces were in place for a great show; especially the acting, which in some respects has been the thing that’s like continually kept us on air for these five seasons,” Down said. “Our writing and our production has caught up with the strength of the acting in some ways.”

Down said he felt like they’d “grown up on the show,” evolving into the filmmakers and showrunners they are today, while Kay said he thought it would be a “very good story” for Industry to finally achieve the widespread recognition that comes with Emmy nominations.

“It’s been a very wild experience and a really interesting journey to take it from what it was — which is a kind of an experimental show on HBO on Monday nights and BBC2 at like 10:45 — to what it is now, which is like a show that’s watched by a few people,” Down said, laughing. “A few people with good taste.”

“It would just be great, if in its fourth season it could get some sort of recognition purely because the actors have always deserved it,” Kay said. “The fanfare around that and just the general machinery of something like that, I think would just open the show up to a wider audience who might go back in before the fifth season, go and see the stellar work of the acting in the first season onwards.”

“So I like the idea of it purely as a way of bringing the show to as many people as possible.”

Industry Seasons 1-4 are now streaming on HBO Max.