The Song Behind the 'Moon Knight' Trailer Is Even More Fitting Than We Realized

For those Marvel fans who may not have been tuned in to late 2000s hip-hop, the song underneath the trailer for Moon Knight may sound like it was written for the new Disney Plus series. However, the song actually has a history of its own. Although its history still can’t quite rival Moon Knight’s lore, it’s the perfect song to introduce us to Moon Knight.

The trailer opens with Oscar Isaac’s Steven Grant struggling to sleep, explaining over the phone that he can’t discern the “difference between [his] waking life and dreams.” And once the action begins, we hear a foreboding, “Day and night,” mixed in with other lyrics. So what is the ominous song?

In 2008, Kid Cudi, a new hip-hop artist at the time, released “Day ‘N’ Night” on his breakout mixtape, “A Kid Named Cudi,” and then again in 2009 on his debut album, “Man on the Moon: The End of Day.”

It’s safe to say that anyone who listened to the radio in the 2000s knew this song and recognized it immediately. It’s the song that catapulted Kid Cudi’s fame and even garnered the attention of Yeezy himself.

The version of Kid Cudi’s song that we hear in the Moon Knight trailer is beyond stripped down — it’s basically an echo of the original version with a ticking clock and electronic warps heard behind it. However, the repetition of Kid Cudi’s voice and lyrics fit perfectly with Steven’s unraveling throughout the trailer. It’s the perfect song to fill in the Moon Knight soundtrack.

The opening lyrics of “Day ‘N’ Nite” are, “Day and night, I toss and turn, I keep stressing my mind.” Our introduction to Steven is that he can’t sleep and that it’s causing “chaos” within his mind, so the repetition of “day and night” and “in my mind” melting together in the trailer add to the feeling of stress and anxiety that Steven is clearly undergoing.

We also hear the lyric, “Hold the phone,” while hearing ringing phones as Steven picks up a mysterious call. Can we expect more fateful phone calls throughout the series? It’s likely. One final lyric that seems to encompass all of Moon Knight that we don’t hear in the trailer is, “The lonely loner seems to free his mind at night.” If Steven is the loner, is his alter ego, Moon Knight, freed at night?

Not only are the lyrics of “Day ‘N’ Nite” fitting for Moon Knight, but the song’s inspiration, “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” by the Geto Boys, is also super relevant. In a 2012 Complex interview, Kid Cudi confirmed the 1991 single as a major source of inspiration.

The Geto Boys’ lyrics are much darker, even though the song sounds much more upbeat. It’s essentially about someone who’s paranoid and both seeing and dreaming of visions, not unlike Steven in Moon Knight.

The first episodes of Moon Knight premiere on March 30 on Disney Plus.