Andor Season 2 Trailer Finally Arrives, With Unexpected Musical Backing

It feels like it’s been a veritable eon since the first season of smuggler/rogue/cutthroat Cassian Andor’s adventures on Disney+ unexpectedly arrived to become the single most well-received piece of Star Wars storytelling in the Disney era. And indeed, it has been almost that long: Season 1 of Andor dropped onto Disney’s streaming service in Sept. of 2022, meaning that by the time we finally pick back up with these characters it will have been going on three years. But finally, after so much waiting and anticipation, we have some concrete footage to watch of Andor season 2 in the trailer below, and it comes with a decidedly unexpected piece of musical accompaniment, which has unexpectedly already caused a ruffling of feathers among various subsets of Star Wars fans.

That is likely because one tends to associate Star Wars properties, particularly adult-minded ones like Andor, with orchestral music and obviously with the immortal John Williams, and not with licensed cowpunk tunes. And yet that’s what we have here in the trailer below, from country rock legend Steve Earle. The track is “The Revolution Starts Now,” from his Grammy-winning 2004 cowpunk album of the same name. A bit on the nose, perhaps, in terms of its accompaniment of the budding Rebel Alliance that we’ll root for throughout the original Star Wars trilogy, but one gets the sense that this trailer was likely cut together under instruction from Disney to broaden the accessibility of Andor, a series that was adored by critics and lovers of spy fiction but not universally adopted by the Star Wars rank and file; the kind of people who managed to stomach the unwatchable likes of Rise of Skywalker.

As for the actual footage on display, it seems a lot more promising. As ever, Andor is a series leaning on its deep ensemble cast as it portrays the fomenting of a galaxy wide rebellion, with figures such as Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) helping to build ideological and funding support for the nascent rebellion from within, while ambitious Imperial cogs like Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) and Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) trying to rise through the ranks by ferreting out any hint of insurrection. There certainly appear to be more filmic crossovers in the works here as well, including the return of Forest Whitaker as paranoid guerilla Saw Gerrera, and Ben Mendelsohn as the franchise’s greatest bureaucratic, entitled pencil-pusher villain, Orson Krennic, both of whom were major parts of Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One. There will be plenty of plotting, scheming and spycraft at play when Andor season 2 arrives on Disney+ on April 22. Meanwhile, check out the trailer below.