Music, more specifically pop music, has been a major part of Gunn’s repertoire for his entire film career. The writer/director put some of the most obscure Marvel characters on the map thanks to a pitch-perfect ‘70s pop soundtrack in Guardians of the Galaxy. That song-selecting skill persisted through his other films like GotG Vol. 2 and last year’s DC effort The Suicide Squad. Gunn has a lot of excellent soundtracks to choose from. But according to the man himself, his favorite just has to be his latest: Peacemaker, the HBO Max series spinoff to The Suicide Squad. In speaking to TV critics last summer during the Television Critics Association press tour, Gunn revealed that Peacemaker’s soundtrack was the one he was looking forward to the most since the original Guardians film. “It’s a lot of ‘80s hair metal but it’s also a lot of ‘sleaze rock’ and hair metal that comes out of Europe. It was fun finding the really good stuff to inject the series with its flavor, which we kept throughout the whole first season,” Gunn said. None other than James Gunn himself has released the Peacemaker soundtrack to Spotify, saving beleaguered TV journalists the task of rewatching each episode with Shazam open. Check out the full track listing below. This list opens with “Do You Wanna Taste It” because how could it open with anything else? This song from modern day Norwegian glam metal band Wig Wam features in every Peacemaker episode as part of the brilliant opening credits. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Gunn revealed that “Do You Wanna Taste It” felt like the de facto Peacemaker theme song from the start. “The Wig Wam song was just, to be completely honest, one of the first things I thought of,” Gunn told Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone. “I started collecting a list of Peacemaker music long before I started writing the show. And the Wig Wam song just seemed to be the one that had perfect lyrics for our show: ‘Do you wanna taste it? Do you really wanna taste it?’ And so there really was nothing else in consideration besides that song. It came to me, along with the idea of the dance itself written into the teleplays.” In addition to Wig Wam’s opener, this soundtrack is dotted with other songs of note. The inclusion of a metal version of Foster the People’s “Pumped Up Kicks” by John Murphy and Ralph Saenz hails from a joke in episode 2 in which one character’s girlfriend makes fun of him for liking the faux cheerful song about a school shooting. It also plays over that episode’s credits.
