The critical urge to compare Luca Guadagnino’s latest project We Are Who We Are (an eight-episode series on HBO) to one of his recent films, Call Me by Your Name, and to HBO’s previous Gen-Z coming of age, Euphoria, will be unconquerable. All three works feature mid-teen protagonists (many of whom are non-binary) fraught with mid teen stress—peers, puberty, and, for one, peaches. They are right of passage stories. Stories about sexual identity. Stories about reckless abandon. They probably make your grandma nostalgic or nauseous and nothing in between.
But Guadagnino’s series (which the Italian-born director both wrote and directed) feels like a much more mature version of the adapted Call Me by Your Name—and it exchanges the somewhat awkward and fantastical romancing of that film for a world that feels more real, more lived in, and more relevant.
As for the Euphoria angle—sure, there’s lots of drinking and smoking and hooking up, but it’s not shown here in Euphoria’s more destructive form. The teenagers of We Are Who We Are—third culture kids raised on military bases, mostly in Italy—throw all the tantrums and fits you might expect, but their transgressions are more normative and rebellious than self-abusive and medicinal.
What We Are Who We Are does share with its HBO teenage counterpart, however, is an attentiveness to youth culture, a big pillar of which remains music. That means parties with Bluetooth bangers and lots of bus rides with earbuds and ennui.
So here are all the songs that make the We Are Who We Are soundtrack so much like those previous teenage dramas—even as the series does away with their hyperreal, hyperbolic worlds.
Episode 1
“I was Looking At The Ceiling and Then I Saw The Sky” by John Adams
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“Sayonara” by Ryuichi Sakamoto
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“Coonskin and Alligator Hide”
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“Actin Crazy” by Action Bronson
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“Nessun Grado Di Separazione” by Francesca Michielin
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“L’Ultima Festa” by Cosmo
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“The Love We Make” by Prince
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“Why Must The Show Go On (2003 Digital remaster)” by Giorgio Moroder, Phil Oakey
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“Devil In A New Dress” by Kanye West Ft. Rick Ross
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“A Lei” by Anna Oxa
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“Aziz and Azizah Continued” by Kip Hanrahan
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“Same Drugs” by Chance The Rapper
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“Italy (National Anthem)” by APM
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“Just One Look” by Klaus Nomi
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“Star Spangled Banner” by APM
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“Champagne Coast” by Blood Orange
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“Three Weeks And Still I’m Outta My Mind” by John Adams
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Josh St. Clair
Joshua St Clair is an editorial assistant at Men’s Health Magazine.
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