Heated Rivalry composer Peter Peter explains his “almost vulgar” first drafts, Scott and Kip Easter eggs, and the intentional quiet of “The Cottage.”
Photo: HBO Max
At South London’s Clapham Grand, in the first of the venue’s now-weekly Heated Rivalry club nights, something was eliciting feral screams. The party hadn’t officially started yet, but as hockey-jersey-clad clubbers filtered onto the dance floor, a recognizable needle drop blared through the speakers. It wasn’t a soundtrack fan favorite like t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said” or Wet Leg’s “mangetout.” It was “Rivalry,” the first episode’s gritty synth symphony of an opening track from the electronic score composed by Peter Jones, who is credited on the series under his stage name, Peter Peter.
In Jones’s ambient soundscape, competition thrums through crunchy synths and heavy drumbeats, while the show’s tender heart floats across dancing arpeggios. “I thought my job was more low profile on this one,” the Québécois synth-pop musician says of signing on to write the music for the Canadian sports romantic drama. “I didn’t want to be intrusive in the show.”
Before Heated Rivalry, Jones had five albums to his name and zero credits as a composer, but series creator Jacob Tierney was a huge fan of Peter Peter and wrote the scripts while listening to the singer-songwriter’s 2024 record Éther. Tierney initially enlisted Jones to create an original score and lend several needle drops from the album. “It just kind of fell through,” Jones recalls. “We got caught with the timeline.” As negotiations slowed down, the needle drops were abandoned in favor of additional original-score cues, and Jones ended up writing dozens across the series’ six episodes.
Like seemingly every facet of the show’s production, the timeline was daunting. Once Canadian streamer Crave moved Heated Rivalry’s release forward from February to late November, Jones was confronted with fast-approaching deadlines. “I had ten days to deliver episode one,” he says. “So you can imagine it was seven to ten days an episode — approximately seven weeks to complete the whole show.” Tierney gave Jones freedom to experiment, but they remained in constant conversation: The composer uploaded mp4 drafts to a shared Google Drive folder for swift feedback. “To this day, I don’t know if that’s how TV composers work, but we had no time, so I couldn’t just send him temporary files,” Jones says. For a first-time composer, Heated Rivalry was a turbocharged trial by fire, one that Jones wouldn’t have any other way: “It’s a hell of a first gig.”
Jones began composing solely from the scripts, though it wasn’t until he saw the footage that he realized his interpretation wasn’t right. “I knew that they were expecting me to make ‘sex music’ at some point — it just wasn’t how I was picturing the intimacy scenes,” he explains. “It was way more emotional, so you couldn’t just put a four-on-the-floor techno beat over sex if it didn’t make sense.” Jones says his first attempt felt “very intrusive” and “almost vulgar,” so he pivoted to lighter melodies and synth-chord arrangements to soften the texture.
His first pass at the score also led him to believe he would have to write more cues than what was required. “According to the script, the whole night club with t.A.T.u.’s ‘All the Things She Said’ — I was supposed to score that, but in the end I wasn’t needed,” Jones says. Spotting sessions, where the director sits down with the composer to watch footage and select which scenes require original-score or licensed music, clarified just how many cues he would need to compose.
Jones had a wealth of external gear on hand, and each instrument had its role: Access Virus, a digital synthesizer that’s “out of this world and can do anything you’d like,” was used for “pads,” or atmospheric chord harmonies that enhance the texture of the music. For the arpeggio melodies and bass lines, the composer relied on raw analog synthesizers like the Korg Mono/Poly and the Juno-60. Percussion beats were sequenced on his drum machine, the Elektron Analog Rytm. Jones also bought a Hapax sequencer from the French company Squarp to build most of the arrangements. To record the cues, he synced Logic Pro, the music-creation software, to the show’s footage and improvised along to the scenes in real time. “I synced the computer with this whole external setup so I could stop looking at the recording software and just look at the image,” the composer says. “I would just jam with these machines and capture the improvisations.”
One of the Éther needle drops that failed to make the final cut was “Lisbonne,” a sensual pop ballad that would’ve soundtracked the first time hockey rivals Shane (Hudson Williams) and Ilya (Connor Storrie) have sex in episode two. Jones wrote an original song to replace “Lisbonne,” and Tierney suggested adding lyrics. “Sometimes it takes two or three years to write a whole album and produce it, but I had one night, so it was crazy,” Jones says of writing “It’s You.” “I started with the arpeggio synth and then I put pads on it, and I could hear the lyrics.” His breathy vocals speak to what Shane and Ilya are afraid to admit to themselves — that their relationship has progressed far beyond casual hookups: “Stay right here / Don’t ever leave,” he sings.
At the time of writing, Jones felt the pressure to create a track with the same emotional potency of “Lisbonne” without the privilege of months to perfect it. “It was like, Oh man, I have to beat my own songs!” he jokes. Still, remnants of those forgotten needle drops exist elsewhere: “Ciel,” another track from Éther, was intended for an All-Star Game in Tampa. It lives on as the name of the night club where Shane and Ilya trade longing gazes in episode four.
As a tender contrast to the pulsating synths that course through much of the score, the piano is crucial to the series’ more intimate moments. The inspiration came from an unlikely place: the soap opera The Young and the Restless. “The piano theme is very dramatic,” Jones says of the soap’s music. “I thought it was interesting to add this sensitivity because it’s part of the language of romance to me. I knew that I didn’t want just EDM songs.” (Jones even named one of Scott and Kip’s themes “Young and Restless”; it plays after a panicked Scott escapes a gallery date with Kip in episode three, “Hunter.”)
For the scene in which Shane and Ilya dip into a bathroom during a Vegas awards ceremony, the score is pared back to soft piano chords that echo as though they’re bouncing off the porcelain tiles. Jones created the “warp-y piano” by running those notes through a rack-mount effects unit, a device that alters the sound of the piano. When Ilya offers Shane his “deal” to hook up later, the score holds on a long suspended chord that heightens the tension of the exchange. “I needed to hold back on progression in this very moment and to keep it hanging, because that’s what he does to Shane,” Jones says.
After Shane loses MVP to Ilya, they escape to the latter’s penthouse suite for a round of sex lacking in the tenderness of their first time. As Ilya instructs Shane to touch himself, the aptly titled “Inferno” plays, a Challengers-esque banger filled with dirty beats, destined to be a mainstay of Heated Rivalry club nights forever.
Even then, Jones resisted the fervid EDM of his first instincts. “It’s very slow techno,” says the composer. “At first, I thought 130 bpm, but ‘Inferno’ is 100 or 90. I really needed to slow everything down. Otherwise, it didn’t fit the direction of the show.” The four-minute track builds in layers — a bass-y drone, then a single drumbeat kicks in before ramping up with what Jones calls a “hacker synth” riff — to grow with the intensity of the scene. Each heavy beat pulls at the tension of the scene until it’s stretched taut. “I wanted to introduce that thrill but also the blurry dynamic in their relationship,” Jones says.
Though much of Jones’s original demos were scrapped, the “Heartbeat” leitmotif was one of the few cues that evolved from his earliest ideas. It’s a romantic series of four cues that return again and again to signal an intimate encounter; in each recurring appearance, the chords remain the same, but the texture varies. “Heartbeat I” foregrounds a bouncing synth melody as Shane and Ilya reunite after months apart in episode one; the rapid descending arpeggio of “Heartbeat II” plays as Ilya sexts Shane before a game. “Heartbeat III” — of tuna-melt infamy — fluctuates in tempo before accelerating to a climax. It’s maybe the most pivotal motif in Shane and Ilya’s story, but Jones describes it simply: “It just sounds like love, so I wanted those chords to evolve as their love evolved. It’s the theme of their hearts syncing.”
When Jones first read the scripts, the story of fellow hockey star Scott (François Arnaud) and his smoothie barista boyfriend, Kip (Robbie G.K.), wasn’t its own stand-alone episode but sprinkled across two episodes. Once it was clear the structure of the show had changed, the composer knew he had to create a contrasting sonic world for Scott and Kip. Jones differentiated theirs from Shane and Ilya’s by incorporating the guitar: “I used the ‘Young and Restless’ theme for that,” Jones says. “That was originally composed on the piano and then I did a version on electric guitar and did some synth arrangements on top.”
“La Nuit Est Longue” is the other major cue, a hopeful track of steady electronic drums, cymbals, and pads that accompany Scott and Kip’s first night together. Musically, it deviates again from Shane and Ilya’s world, but Jones ensured there was some overlap. “In a way, it’s the same chords as ‘Heartbeat,’” he explains. “I wanted to make a reference to the previously written music, but I didn’t want it to be obvious, so the chord placement and rhythm is way different. I needed to blur things a bit.”
When Shane and Ilya argue on a Las Vegas rooftop at the end of their rookie year, the longing and regret of that confrontation is set to “Two Souls”: wistful hornlike drones paired with a repeated crescendoing rhythm. It’s a theme that doesn’t return until much later in the season through the track’s softer counterpart, “One Soul.” This acoustic version, led by Jones’s shorthand for romance, the piano, is teased after Ilya confesses his love for Shane over the phone in Russian. It returns in its totality at Shane’s cottage the morning after they admit their love for each other.
Jones had initially composed a different cue entirely for the cottage, but Tierney was so attached to “Two Souls” that he suggested bringing it back. The pair of tracks are actually the instrumental version of a song Jones had written with lyrics and guitar. (It remains unreleased, but he “might work on it in the future.”) As Jones was figuring out track titles, the parallel between those moments crystallized: “The rooftop was them being in love but separated by life, you know?” At the cottage, Shane and Ilya are finally brought together. “They become one at the very end,” he says.
By the season’s conclusion, the music is intentionally sparse. “The pace is so different,” Jones explains. “The empty space is important.” Silence is just as vital to the texture of a scene as sound, and in the case of the finale episode, “The Cottage,” that blanket of quiet introduces its own sense of tension: the anticipation of when Shane and Ilya’s isolated bubble will burst.
That intrusion comes when Shane’s father spots his son and Ilya mid-kiss. At Shane’s parents’ house, he awkwardly comes out to them with Ilya by his side, then follows his mother outside, where she apologizes for not providing a safe space for Shane to be himself. The scene is scored to “Utopie,” a series of soothing, airy chords that wouldn’t be out of place at a spa retreat. In fact, this is the second time the motif appears, the first being in episode four, “Rose,” when Shane and Ilya wake up from a nap cuddled together.
Jones identified those two scenes — Shane’s parents’ unconditional acceptance and a short-lived afternoon of domestic bliss — as “a glimpse of what could be,” idyllic moments that are nonetheless ephemeral. “It felt like they were close to the perfect life,” he says. “They were momentarily not thinking about what the hockey world would think of them. They felt free.”