With the final season of Netflix’s You causing quite a stir on the internet since its launch last Thursday, April 26, we’re putting our own spin on bidding the series farewell. Record spin, that is.
The main character, Joe Goldberg, played by Penn Badgley, is a man of too-many-to-keep-track-of contradictions. Bookish yet brutal, romantic yet ruthless. Across five seasons of You, each of Joe’s love interests reveals a different shade of his psyche and a different version of deeply disturbing obsession. But what if we soundtracked their stories? Below, we’ve paired each of his partners with the album that best captures their essence and character arc—right down to the fatal finale. If you haven’t binge-watched the new season of You (like I did the moment it dropped on Netflix, hardly moving from my couch for nearly 10 straight hours), this is your last warning: SPOILERS AHEAD!
Joe Goldberg
Radiohead — Pablo Honey
Joe is layered, brooding, and buried beneath delusions of true love and a sense of moral superiority. Radiohead’s Pablo Honey ironically opens with the track “You,” a fittingly obsessive track that opens with the lines, “You are the sun and moon and stars are you/And I could never run away from you,” and that mirrors Joe’s fragmented mind.
“Creep,” Radiohead’s breakout hit, weaves through You like a recurring nightmare—playing in Season 1, resurfacing in the Season 2 trailer, and returning once more in the final episode of Season 5. The track echoes Joe’s self-loathing and isolation, a fitting soundtrack for a man who turns obsession into romance and calmly reads literature after committing murder. Like Pablo Honey, Joe aestheticizes alienation and makes the horrors of life feel seductive. But by the final season, that illusion unravels. No longer framed as a tortured antihero (cue Taylor Swift), Joe becomes clumsy, cruel, and unmistakably the villain. Where earlier seasons explored the psychological weight of obsession, Season 5 leans fully into horror: Joe is no longer just a man on the edge—he is the monster.
Guinevere Beck (Season 1)
Lana Del Rey — Born To Die
Beck lives like a tragic story already in motion—dreamy, lost, and longing for validation in all the wrong places. She romanticizes struggle—false struggles, in fact—despite her privilege, curates a perfect online persona, and clings to toxic love. Joe assumes “you want to be seen, heard, known,” but it’s Beck’s self-doubt that draws her into danger. From the idolized fantasy of “Video Games” to the aching need for attention in “Summertime Sadness,” Lana Del Rey‘s Born To Die is equal parts glamour and rot—just like Beck’s fate.
But if Born To Die represents Beck’s projection, In Utero captures what’s beneath it: the rawness, the unraveling, the barely concealed grief. Tracks like “Heart-Shaped Box” echo her contradictions—the craving to be understood and the compulsion to self-sabotage. The show leaves a trail of Nirvana clues: the opening shot of the pilot frames Mooney’s next to a storefront called Nirvana, Beck wears a Nirvana T-shirt similar to one worn by Joe’s mother in flashbacks, and Joe’s coworker Ethan casually notes that Desperate Characters—the book Beck buys in episode 1—was written by Courtney Love’s grandmother, Paula Fox. These breadcrumbs hint at the truth: Beck was never built for survival. She didn’t just fall into someone else’s fantasy—she disintegrated inside her own.
Love Quinn (Season 2 & 3)
Paramore — Brand New Eyes
Love is sunshine and fury, warm and magnetic, domesticity and destruction. Brand New Eyes captures the whiplash of her affections—how quickly openness and vulnerability transforms into rage and resentment. Whale “The Only Exception” reflects her belief that Joe is her shot at real love in season 2, the real thesis is “Playing God”—Love micromanages every part of her world, even if it means murder. By Season 3, she’s killing to protect her fantasy of family, unable to see she’s losing herself in the process.
While Paramore’s third release captures the duality of Love’s personality, it’s not without noting that My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade captures the shifting moods of life and death through layers of softness and grief (“I Don’t Love You” and “Cancer”) juxtaposed against moments of unraveling (“Mama”). Much like the funeral march of the album, from the moment that Love becomes entangled with Joe, she is marching unknowingly toward the end. Every relationship she enters—Joe, Forty, her late husband—is a crescendo toward implosion.
Marienne Bellamy (Season 3)
Phoebe Bridgers — Stranger In The Alps
Marienne is the first of Joe’s lovers who truly sees him—or tries to. She’s kind, haunted, and surviving—fighting for custody, sobriety, and a second chance at a life that doesn’t devour her. She doesn’t romanticize pain the way Beck or Love does. Instead, she carries it, quietly and with grace. Stranger In The Alps feels like her inner world: restrained, aching, and steeped in quiet devastation. “Smoke Signals” and “Funeral” soundtrack the low hum of sadness that follows her through the library stacks, where she opens herself to Joe, not knowing that the tenderness he returns is a mask. There’s hope in her voice and in the choices she tries to make, but it’s always shadowed by the looming threat of being pulled under again.
While Phoebe Bridgers‘ Stranger In The Alps reflects her emotional landscape, Turn Out The Lights by Julien Baker captures her reckoning. Baker’s voice is soft and fragile but ultimately resilient—just like Marienne’s. Songs like “Appointments” and “Hurt Less” echo her battle with self-worth, addiction, and the weight of second chances. The album doesn’t offer resolution, but instead, it offers survival, often in the smallest ways. Marienne tries to hold onto that survival, even as her life becomes entangled with Joe’s manipulations. She isn’t tragic because she’s broken—she’s tragic because she keeps trying to heal in a world that punishes her for it.
Kate Lockwood (Season 4 & 5)
Garbage — Version 2.0
Kate is strategy masked as softness. She’s polished, clever, and dangerous—Shirley Manson with an English accent. “I like to wear sheep’s clothing,” Manson sings on the album opener, “Temptation Waits,” and it’s pure Kate across season 4. She flees her past and the power of her family, only to fall for a man just as haunted. Her season-long moral reckoning—whether to follow in her father’s footsteps or carve a new path—plays like an extended remix of Garbage‘s Version 2.0. The show’s reference to “Manson girls” in season 5 is ironic—Kate is no blind follower, but she is capable of just as much carnage. She’s not afraid to play the long game or weaponize her soft side, something that is most evident in the latter half of her marriage with Joe in season 5.
Bronte (Season 5)
Japanese Breakfast — Jubilee
Bronte is a short-lived connection in the final season. She wears a mask that displays the facade of being easygoing, grounded, and emotionally honest—qualities Joe claims to crave but never chooses. In a season marked by manipulation and power plays, Bronte momentarily offers Joe a glimpse of something genuine. Jubilee, the shimmering 2021 album by Japanese Breakfast, mirrors that possibility. It’s filled with joy and wonder, but always edged with grief. Michelle Zauner’s ability to balance effervescence with melancholy makes it the perfect soundtrack for Bronte’s role in the story. Her pairing with this album suggests the kind of connection Joe could have if he weren’t a murderer. Which makes her his most hopeful and tragic “what if” of the series.
