Howard Shore's work on Peter Jackson's trilogy is, by most measures, the most ambitious film score ever written: hours of music, dozens of interlocking themes, and a leitmotif system that rivals opera. But which of the three albums is actually the best listen?
We rated every track on all three soundtracks and computed a time-weighted score for each. Here's the verdict.
1. The Return of the King — 4.64/5
The Return of the King is the peak. By the third film, Shore had every theme established and could spend the whole runtime paying them off — Gondor in full voice, the lighting of the beacons, "The Return of the King" itself. It's the most emotionally complete of the three and our highest-rated entry in the trilogy.
2. The Fellowship of the Ring — 4.27/5
The Fellowship of the Ring had the hardest job: introduce an entire musical world from scratch. It does, and the Shire theme alone is worth the price of admission. It scores a hair below Return mostly because it spends more time establishing ideas than resolving them.
3. The Two Towers — 4.02/5
The Two Towers is the connective tissue — tense, darker, and structurally the trickiest, since middle chapters rarely get clean beginnings or endings. It's still a 4.02, which tells you how high the floor is here.
The takeaway
The trilogy scores 4.64, 4.27, and 4.02 — a remarkably tight band that makes Shore the most consistent composer in our entire catalogue. If you only listen to one, make it The Return of the King. If you listen to all three in order, you'll hear one of the great long-form achievements in screen music.
See where the trilogy lands overall in the full rankings, or explore the rest of Howard Shore's reviews.