The Best Part of Ski Movies Isn't the Skiing, It's the Music

Songs broaden a ski film’s impact further than moving pictures alone ever could. A fond tune can show up anywhere. You might hear that one song in the bar. Or, it might buzz out of the radio of your friend’s car as you drive to the mountain.

Either way, you’re suddenly transported back to the moment that you watched the ski segment you can’t forget.

Rowdy skiing alone is, of course, impressive. Take Candide Thovex’s One of Those Days series. The short edits, which chronicled the French skier’s supernatural talents from a POV angle, are silent aside from the crunch of snow and the whistling wind. It worked.

Imagine that formula stretched across a feature length film, though. It would eventually get boring. And remember all the times that movie makers, in selecting a track, took their ski film from solid to transcendent.

Muzak—the music that plays in elevators and sounds like antidepressants feel—just won’t do. Skiing deserves better. For instance, Greg Stump’s 1988 release, the Blizzard of Aahhh’s, struck a nerve, helping launch the modern understanding of extreme skiing. The on-snow talent, which included Glen Plake and Scot Schmidt, obviously dazzled, but the music sold Stump’s vision.

Rather than relying on stock studio soundtracks like other ski film production companies of the day, Stump pulled some hot pop music. One song, Warriors of the Wasteland by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, infused one of the film’s segments with an incredible jolt of pure 1980s energy.

Sail by AWOLNATION was a different song that, for a time, seemed to have the ski industry—and the rest of the world, for that matter—in a chokehold. It soon became hilariously overplayed.

Watch: Jake Mageau X Games REAL SKI 2020, Song: High Way by Shitkid

However, no matter how you feel about Sail's drilling beat, the song's popularity in the 2010s makes sense. Like the Teton Gravity Research and Matchstick Productions segments that used Sail, it was big and epic. It was the perfect fit for impressive skiing.

More recently, it’s hard to imagine Jake Mageau’s standout Real Ski part without High Way by Shitkid. The song sounds like street skiing—it’s droning, heavy, and hits you right in the stomach.

Every skier in these segments is an incredible athlete, but, at times, it can feel like everyone else is, too. There are kids who ski better than the pros did 15 years ago.

How, then, does a ski movie segment become truly memorable? It’s all about the tunes.

Take it from me. Every time Balance—or any other Future Islands song for that matter—appears in my headphones, the mountains don’t seem so far away.

I know you have a song in mind, too.