TLJ has more or less three new themes, the most obvious being Rose’s and the second most obvious being a new one for Luke. Both can be found in the track “The Rebellion is Reborn,” which is a concert suite.

TLJ is definitely light on new themes (though no more so than ROTS). This is somewhat disappointing but the quality of a score is not entirely dependent on a simple number of how many new themes there are. TLJ, in this way, is sort of an inverse of TFA. The latter introduced so many new themes, and didn’t do all that much with the old ones. This time, Williams really digs deep into the existing themes (primarily the ones from TFA, of course), and gives them some of their absolute best renditions.

Ultimately I think I prefer TFA (the highlights are better), but TLJ is a lot more consistently fantastic (basically no lows to speak of). Another great effort by Williams, it’s not an accident he was nominated for an Oscar yesterday.