Prime Video’s Carrie almost ended to a different song. The finale viewers have been replaying all week turns on “Shy Girl,” a synth-pop single by Los Angeles duo Haute & Freddy, and it only landed there because Mike Flanagan heard the song as an unreleased demo and rearranged his ending around it.
Flanagan told the Television Academy that the duo “became our musical identity very early,” as Stereogum reported. A demo of “Shy Girl” reached him long before the song was released, and it clicked so completely that he rewrote the eighth episode to make room for it. “It became the backbone of our score,” he said.
That is not a figure of speech. The Newton Brothers built their Carrie score around the song, and Milan Records’ soundtrack album, released October 7 alongside the series, devotes three of its eight tracks to “Shy Girl” variations. Anyone who has been humming the score’s recurring theme has been humming Haute & Freddy all along.
In the finale, “Shy Girl” soundtracks the moment viewers keep clipping, Carrie and Emaline dancing in the street in a burst of pure release. It is the payoff of a season-long thread. Haute & Freddy songs run through the whole series, “Femme Hysteria” in the premiere, “Freaks,” “Anti-Superstar,” “I Like My People Weird” and “Dance The Pain Away” among them. In the seventh episode, the duo’s brand-new cover of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” plays as prom music inside the story itself, and Summer H. Howell’s Carrie wears a Haute & Freddy shirt in episodes two and three.
Haute & Freddy are Michelle Buzz and Lance Shipp, two Los Angeles songwriters with credits for artists including Katy Perry and Britney Spears, as SPIN detailed in a profile last fall. They started the duo as a weekend escape from writing for other people, and it shows in the best way. The sound is 1980s synth-pop, the look is an 18th-century circus that ran away from itself, all bloomers, pirate tops and carnival pageantry, and their fans, who call themselves the Royal Court, show up to concerts in homemade jester hats.
“Shy Girl” itself arrived as a single in April 2025 and became the duo’s calling card. It is their most-streamed song by a wide margin, and its scale is easier to see in the totals than in any one week. Spotify tracking site Kworb put the song at 15.1 million streams on October 5, two days before the series premiered, already pulling in roughly 47,000 streams a day, and it has since climbed past 15.5 million. Before Carrie, the song had already been licensed for film and television five times over.
Their debut album, Big Disgrace, arrived in March on Atlantic Records. Spotify had already named them to its Artists to Watch list for 2026, and the Big Disgrace tour has been playing to sold-out rooms, with the fall North American leg wrapping October 3 in Minneapolis and UK and European dates ahead in November. What Carrie adds is a signature scene. However the streams grow from here, “Shy Girl” is now tied to one of the year’s most shared television moments, and that is the kind of moment that turns a well-liked single into a standard.