‘Driller Killer’ O.S.T. gets first CD release on Cold Spring
Cold Spring releases the “Driller Killer” O.S.T. on CD on 30 October 2026, the first CD edition of Joe Delia’s 1979 Abel Ferrara score.
Cover art for the 'Driller Killer' O.S.T. CD release on Cold Spring.
Cold Spring will release the “Driller Killer” O.S.T. on CD on 30 October 2026, the first CD edition of Joe Delia’s score for Abel Ferrara’s 1979 film “The Driller Killer.” The score mixes Delia’s synthesizer-and-tape cues with music credited to the film’s fictional punk band, Tony Coca-Cola and the Roosters, and two J.S. Bach inventions.
“The Driller Killer” was shot on 16mm in 1977 and 1978 around Ferrara’s Union Square apartment in New York, written by Nicholas St. John and produced by Ferrara’s company Navaron Films on a low budget. Ferrara directed, edited and starred as Reno Miller under the pseudonym Jimmy Laine. The film was added to the UK’s video nasties list in 1983 and banned under the Video Recordings Act 1984. The BBFC approved a fully uncut release only in 2002.
The CD comes in a 6-panel, high-gloss digipak designed around Douglas Metro’s paintings from the film, with a booklet of liner notes from Delia and Ferrara and a folded poster reproducing the film’s original theatrical artwork. Cold Spring sourced the release from long-lost film master tapes, remastered with approval from Delia and Ferrara. The soundtrack first appeared in May 2026 as a vinyl LP through the label Recently Deceased, limited to 1,000 copies with the same artwork and liner notes. The Cold Spring CD is its first appearance on that format.
Delia describes the scoring sessions and the equipment they used at the time: “Driller Killer was a crash course in real time to scoring music to picture. We sat around the Steenbeck scoring directly to Jackie’s 2 track Tandberg deck. We had two synthesizers… an ARP odyssey and an ARP string ensemble.”
Ferrara, describing the sessions’ New York origins, commented: “Putting these tracks together is like field recordings but instead of the deep south it’s the cross roads of 18 St and Broadway, a loft building next to the firehouse with a lot of this music played in an abandoned floor where we weren’t squatting but were not far from it. Most of the people on this record are ghosts to me now, dead or just gone… but the ghost of Tony Coca Cola rides again with his head still on his shoulders and looking straight ahead with the sounds of 77/78 NYC all over the tracks.”
Tony Coca-Cola and the Roosters is the fictional band that performs in the film’s Max’s Kansas City scenes, reflected in the tracklist’s two “Driller Killer” cues named for that setting. The 17-track listing runs:
- Man In The Church
- Fool For You
- Bach Invention #1
- Ballad Of Nicky & Nadine
- Driller Killer – Lobby
- Pizza Pizza
- Driller Killer – Max’s Kansas City
- 27th Spirit
- Nobody’s My Girlfriend
- Baybi Daye Crying
- Stromboli Shuffle
- Driller Killer – Death Of The Art Dealer
- Grand Street Stomp
- Bach Invention #14
- Driller Killer
- Louie’s Murder
- Abel Metro Mac Grand Street
About the ‘Driller Killer’ soundtrack
“The Driller Killer” was Abel Ferrara’s second feature, following his 1976 debut “9 Lives of a Wet Pussy.” Joe Delia, born in Brooklyn on 11 October 1948, had already worked as a session keyboardist and arranger for Dusty Springfield, Grace Slick, Janis Ian, Pat Benatar and Engelbert Humperdinck, and served as Composer in Residence at Sarah Lawrence College, before scoring two low-budget Ferrara features in the 1970s. Delia and Ferrara’s collaboration continued through “Ms. 45” (1980), “China Girl,” “King of New York,” “Dangerous Game,” “The Addiction,” “The Funeral,” “Subway Stories” and “The Blackout” (1997), ending during the production of “New Rose Hotel” (1998) before the two reunited for the 2017 documentary “Alive in France.”
Cold Spring has built a parallel catalog of film-soundtrack reissues and first-time physical releases: the label gave Kristian Eidnes Andersen’s “Antichrist” soundtrack its first physical release in 2019, revived the “Decoder” soundtrack in 2025, and issued the “Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom” soundtrack in February 2026. The “Driller Killer” O.S.T. CD extends that pattern to Delia and Ferrara’s own long-lost score, five months after its first release on vinyl.
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