One of the strangest things about Stranger Things, Netflix’s hit sci-fi mystery set in 1980s Indiana, is the way it’s made stars of Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon. The Austin analogue aficionados were electronic music cult-concerns, making unfashionable retro synthscapes with their band Survive, before the series’ creators, the Duffer brothers, came calling. The duo’s pulsing score to the show’s first season in 2016 propelled them into bumper-sized venues at home and abroad, as audiences clamoured to see the streaming smash’s arpeggiating melodies and echoing snare slaps recreated live.

Three years and another two Stranger Things OSTs later, their biggest British show to date feels at once well-earned (Stein and Dixon have been honing their atmospheric sound since 2009) and like something out of the Upside Down. Tangerine Dream-inspired noise-makers like them are usually confined to the underground, not 2,700-seater auditoriums.

The duo quickly prove that they’re about more than just mood-setting for Eleven and co’s antics, leaning heavily into the sonic savagery of their more nightmarish motifs from the show. Synths shudder, simmer and hiss as themes such as Mirkwood and Rats, from the series’ recent third season, build towards cacophonous climaxes, elevated by impressive visuals: Stein and Dixon are barely visible throughout, hidden in a wreckage of frayed cables, behind clouds of smoke and glitching red lights.

Whether or not the music can captivate detached from the Spielbergian romance of the Duffers’ visuals is down to personal preference. But by the time their creeping showpiece, the show’s intro music, reaches its giddy peak, it’s hard not to be drawn in.

• Meltdown is at the Royal Festival Hall, London, until 11 August.