Writing's on the Wall

Written by Sam Smith and Jimmy Napes as the title song for Spectre, the twenty-fourth James Bond film, and released on 25 September 2015, six weeks before the picture opened. It reached number one on the UK singles chart in the issue dated 8 October, and went on to take the Golden Globe and the Academy Award for best original song — the second Bond theme in succession to win the Oscar, after Adele's Skyfall. Smith sings much of it in falsetto over a slow orchestral arrangement, closer to a lament than to the brass fanfares the series had used.