Brandon Boyd, best known as the frontman of the rock band Incubus, has signed on to compose the score for his first feature film. The project is "Unknown Company," a horror-thriller directed by Vincent Talenti, and it marks a notable pivot for a musician whose voice has long been associated with alternative rock rather than cinematic suspense. The news, first reported exclusively, places Boyd behind the scenes on a film whose story hinges on dread and moral unease rather than on the concert stage.
"Unknown Company" follows a small unit of American soldiers who are dispatched behind enemy lines with orders to find the wreckage of an unidentified object. What begins as a retrieval mission turns into something far more harrowing, becoming a psychological and moral reckoning that compels the men to grapple with fear, loyalty, and the fallout of encountering something they cannot explain. The premise places the film somewhere between a war story and a horror piece, using the isolation of the mission and the mystery of the crashed object to generate tension rather than relying on a straightforward action framework.
The cast is led by Ross Marquand and includes Hugh Scott, Zak Steiner, Mace Coronel, Kevin Brooks, Sarah Hay, and Nolan North. Details about the film's runtime and its release plans have not been announced, and the project currently has no audience rating recorded on TMDb, where it sits at 0 out of 10 - a figure that reflects the absence of user votes rather than any critical verdict. The film is an English-language Hollywood production.
A First Feature Score for a Veteran Performer
Boyd's move into feature scoring is unusual mostly for its timing. He has spent decades as the public face of Incubus, a band whose catalog helped define the sound of late-1990s and 2000s alternative rock, and his voice is instantly recognizable to a generation of listeners. Stepping into film composition means working in a register where the music is meant to support images and atmosphere rather than carry a melody to the front. For a thriller built on psychological strain, a score has to do quiet work - sustaining unease, shaping the audience's sense of what the soldiers are walking toward, and knowing when to pull back.
Talenti's film appears designed to reward that kind of restraint. The story's central object is never described in the materials available, and the mission's turn toward a moral reckoning suggests the movie leans on character pressure as much as on scares. That combination gives a first-time film composer room to experiment with texture and tension instead of chasing a conventional horror sound. Boyd's background in rock performance does not automatically translate to scoring, but it does mean he arrives with a developed sense of dynamics and pacing - tools that matter when a film's suspense depends on when sound enters and when it stays away.
A Genre Hybrid With an Ensemble at Its Center
"Unknown Company" is being categorized as both horror and thriller, a pairing that fits its hybrid setup: soldiers, a remote mission, and an unexplained find. The ensemble structure puts much of the film's weight on the unit's internal relationships, and the presence of performers such as Marquand and North gives the production a recognizable core. The inclusion of Sarah Hay and younger cast members like Coronel hints at a story that may stretch beyond the patrol itself, though the available details stop short of describing how the characters connect.
For now, the film remains without announced distribution or a release window, and neither a runtime nor a TMDb score based on actual viewership is available. Those gaps are typical for a project at this stage, and they leave the most practical questions - when audiences will see "Unknown Company" and how Boyd's score will be received - unanswered. What is clear is that the film has found its composer, and that a rock frontman is about to test himself in a format where the audience rarely knows his name is on the work until the credits roll.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter