‘Cobra Kai’ Composers on Why They Are ‘Super Excited’ About Season 4 Soundtrack (Exclusive)

The fourth season of the Netflix hit series Cobra Kai is the biggest season yet and one of the reasons for the success of Season 4 is the music played in all 10 episodes. PopCulture.com recently caught up with Cobra Kai composers Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson for an exclusive interview to chat about the score and soundtrack for the fourth season — something they are very pumped about. 

“We are super freaking excited about this album,” Birenberg told PopCulture. “It’s actually a double album, where the first disc volume one is the score from the All Valley Tournament, these… the sort of two-episode season finale, that we felt really just plays down like a movie score until we wanted to give it its own listening experience because we feel it’s very self-contained.”

Birenberg goes on to talk about Volume 2 of the soundtrack, which is “the score to the first eight episodes of the season leading up to that, and which we also felt was its kind of own listening experience that takes you through the highs and lows and twists and turns of the season and it delivers you to the tournament. In so far as what to expect on those albums, volume one opens up with kind of our overture for the tournament. A track that we just released as a single called ‘It’s Karate Time.’ That track is based around a brand new theme we wrote for the season that is for the All Valley Tournament.”

For the previous three seasons, Birenberg and Robinson have only produced one disc. But with the season focused on the All Valley KarateTournament, which featured a performance from country music superstar Carrie Underwood, the duo thought having two volumes would make sense. 

“We just felt like we had an opportunity to lay it out a little differently because the finish, the big finish is so big that it needed its own album,” Birenberg said. Adding music to Cobra Kai can be a tall task. For this, season Birenberg and Robinson went to work as soon as filming ended in April. 

“So they finish shooting and then they’re really kind of all knee-deep and editorial at that point where they really start to put the cuts together,” Robinson said. ” And then once the cuts start getting assembled, we start to get involved and we normally start working on them once they’re pretty close to finished cuts, maybe one or two drafts away. We also generally have kind of a broad discussion with Jon [Hurwitz], Josh [Heald] and Hayden [Schlossberg] about the overall direction of the season. We kind of stay out of specifics because we actually like to just watch the show for the first time.”

Season 4 of Cobra Kai was released on New Year’s Day, but the cast and crew finished filming Season 5 before Christmas. This leads to the question of when Birenberg and Robinson will get to work on the fifth season? “Well, probably we know nothing about the season so far because we haven’t seen anything and we haven’t read any scripts so, we’ll be going in cold and I imagine we’ll get started sometime early next year, but we also don’t know when it comes out,” Birenberg said. “So who knows?”