The Bear is back, baby! The best show on TV — my opinion, anyway — made its triumphant return to Hulu last night, dumping its entire third season all at once. People are already posting recaps. I haven’t had time to watch any of it yet, but I’m looking forward to more terrifyingly stressful kitchen scenes and sneaky-gutpunch emotional moments. I’m also looking forward to seeing what the show does with music, and that’s apparently gone through some major changes.
The Bear is famous for, among many other things, its fast-paced needledrops of alt-rock bangers from the ’90s and ’00s. Those freaky-intense kitchen scenes sometimes hit harder when we hear bits and pieces of R.E.M. or the Replacements over that footage. But Brooklyn Vegan reports that Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, probably the greatest film-score composers currently working, provide the score for the first episode by way of 2020’s “Together” from Ghosts V: Together.
The season’s second episode also features a contribution from a ’90s alt-rock legend. The opens with Eddie Vedder singing a quiet acoustic version of “Save It For Later,” the classic single that 2-Tone ska greats the English Beat — or, if you’re English, just plain the Beat — released in 1981. Pearl Jam and solo Vedder have been covering that song live since the ’90s, but this is a studio version. It’s got a sax solo and Vedder quietly singing the phrase “can’t find a better man” at the end. We don’t know if this version is newly recorded or just previously unreleased, but The Bear has already used the Pearl Jam songs “Animal” and “Come Back” on past episodes. Vedder posted the recording on YouTube, and you can hear it below.
Also, at The Bear‘s season-three premiere, Tyler, The Creator, Travis “Taco” Bennett, and Jasper Dolphin reunited with their Odd Future associate Lionel Boyce who plays Marcus on the show.
Tyler, Taco, and Jasper showed out for Lionel at the S3 premiere of ‘The Bear’ ❤️ pic.twitter.com/LhG9EZNyyU
— highsnobiety (@highsnobiety) June 26, 2024
The Bear season three is up on Hulu right now.
