‘Pretty surreal’: Music by Indigenous Edmonton composer featured in final ‘Stranger Things’ season

Audiences don’t get much bigger than a global phenomenon Netflix series.

And when you’re dealing with the much anticipated fifth and final season of “Stranger Things,” well that just ups the ante that much more.

The season five premiere has been watched by more than 60 million people.

That’s a lot of new listeners for Edmonton musician Matthew Cardinal, whose music was featured in “Chapter One: The Crawl.”

“They didn’t tell me when it would be used or how much of it, so I was just kind of on edge the entire time waiting for it to start playing,” Cardinal told CityNews. ‘Is this it? Is this it?’ But it eventually came and I was mind blown.”

Cardinal, who has been making music for 15 years, released his debut album “Asterisms” in 2020. It’s a song on that record – “May 25th” – that was heard by people around the world.

The Indigenous composer tells CityNews it all started with a chance e-mail from his label late this summer. Cardinal says he wasn’t sure if the e-mail was even real, at first.

“I had to read it a few times,” he recounted. “I was like, ‘is this somehow a scam?’ But no, it’s from my record label, it’s from a person I’ve dealt with multiple times. I thought the show would have been done already by that point, but it wasn’t. So I called her, ‘is this real?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I’m saying yes, I’ll do this.’

“It was pretty surreal.”

The track was recorded in Cardinal’s apartment with just a handful of equipment – a sharp contrast to appearing in one of the most talked about TV shows.

“I recorded it in maybe 25 minutes sitting on the floor — basically where I’m sitting,” Cardinal said. “I just had my laptop set up with a synthesizer and a little piano, just playing around, liked how things sounded, pressed record, did a few layers, and I liked it enough to put it out on my album.

“I probably recorded it in 2018. The album came out in 2020. So it was like, I never would have thought that it would be in ‘Stranger Things.’ If you look at the artists that are licensed for that episode, it’s like, Kate Bush, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and me.

“So it’s like, ‘that’s weird.’”

Season five of “Stranger Things” is streaming now on Netflix.