Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore score a skiing documentary on Threshold

Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore have written a film score together, and the film is about an Olympic cross-country skier. Threshold soundtracks a documentary on Jessie Diggins made by directors Lars and Torsten Brinkema, and it marks the second album the pair have released as a duo inside a single year.

The first was Tragic Magic, out in January, which they followed with a joint tour. That record was built around a specific set of instruments, several of them historic and fragile, and the limitation was part of the point. Threshold works from the opposite starting position.

Lattimore laid out the difference in a statement about the record. On Tragic Magic, she said, the constraints were the instruments themselves, but within them the pair had total sonic freedom. On Threshold the instrumentation was open, and the constraint moved somewhere else entirely.

"In the case of Threshold, the sky was the limit with instrumentation and we held an expansive palette," she said, adding that the music had to sit inside the frame of Diggins's life and the directors' vision. Holding both records at once, she said, was challenging and mind-expanding in equal measure.

Three pieces from the album are out ahead of it: Cold Open, Sick And Tired and Gallivare 10km. The last of those takes its name from a Swedish stop on the cross-country World Cup circuit, which gives some sense of how closely the score tracks the shape of an athlete's season rather than a conventional narrative arc.

Florid Recordings and Blue Pool Recordings will release Threshold on 20 November 2026. For Barwick, whose solo work has long built vocal loops into slowly shifting electronic pieces, and for Lattimore, who plays harp, the format of a documentary score is a natural fit: both write music that accumulates rather than announces itself. Release details sit on the release calendar.