Thomas Bergersen: The Sound Behind a Thousand Trailers
- Roman Cigan
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Thomas Bergersen, CC BY-SA 4.0
Some composers write songs. Thomas Bergersen writes moments — the swell before a hero draws a sword, the hush before a planet comes into view, the single horn note that tells you everything is about to change. If you've ever felt a chill during a movie trailer, a stadium walkout, or a highlight reel, there's a decent chance his fingerprints are on it.
From bedroom demos to a genre of his own
Bergersen never went to music school. Born in Trondheim, Norway in 1980, he taught himself piano at six and was writing full symphonic pieces before he'd finished his teens. His first creative outlet wasn't an orchestra at all — it was the demoscene, composing tracked modules under the alias "Lioz" for the group Index. That instinct for building big, emotional sound from scratch never left him.
Everything changed in 2006, when he and Nick Phoenix founded Two Steps From Hell, a Los Angeles-based production music company built to score movie trailers. Their 2010 debut album, Invincible, gave the world "Heart of Courage" — now sitting close to 200 million streams on Spotify and arguably the most recognisable piece of trailer music ever written. Albums like Archangel and SkyWorld followed, cementing a sound that Hollywood, TV, and eventually the whole internet couldn't stop borrowing.
Taking it to the stage
For years, Bergersen's music lived almost entirely behind the scenes — heard everywhere, credited nowhere. That started to shift with a 2013 performance at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and it properly arrived in 2022, when Two Steps From Hell took their music on the road for the first time, playing thirteen European venues with a full live orchestra and choir. A run at Wacken Open Air followed in 2023. In 2024, Bergersen and Phoenix announced they were parting ways as a duo, closing the Two Steps From Hell chapter after nearly two decades together. Bergersen kept moving under his own name, and in 2025 he was invited to perform at the Mountbatten Festival of Music alongside the Bands of HM Royal Marines — proof the demand for his sound never actually depended on the old name.
A composer who never really settled down
Bergersen left Norway for the US in 2009, and by his own account bounced from Los Angeles to Miami to Seattle within a few years — a restlessness that shows up in his music as much as his address book. He's talked about writing from personal relationships and heartbreak (the track "Cassandra," from his 2014 solo album Sun, was reportedly written about a real relationship), and he's an unapologetic gamer, citing Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, Quake, and Hitman: Absolution as old favourites. He composes largely on a grand piano before anything touches a computer, using Cubase to build out the orchestral and electronic layers once a melody exists.
Influences, collaborators, and what's next
Ask Bergersen about influences and you'll get an unusual pairing: Gustav Mahler and Katy Perry, both cited as reference points. He's openly dismissive of genre as a concept, treating it as a cage rather than a compass — which is probably why his catalogue moves so freely between orchestral, ethnic, and electronic textures without ever feeling like a mashup.
That philosophy is most visible in Humanity, his solo album series exploring the full range of human emotion across seven planned chapters. Chapter I landed in 2020; Chapter VI arrived in July 2026, keeping the project's momentum very much alive.
At Soundevote, our favourite entry point isn't even the biggest streaming number. "Victory" earns its place as the second-most-streamed Bergersen track for good reason, but it's "Creation of Earth" — sitting at a comparatively modest six million-plus streams — that we keep coming back to. It doesn't have the reach of "Heart of Courage," but it has that spark: the kind of quiet, aching build that reminds you why Bergersen's music ends up in so many of our biggest screen moments in the first place.
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