Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis know you want to see a ‘Warriors’ musical. Will you get one?

“This is the sound of something being born.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Eisa Davis wrote this lyric for an embodiment of the Bronx in “Survive the Night,” the opening track of their new concept album “Warriors.”

And what’s being born, for Miranda and Davis, is a 26-track voyage through musical genres, New York’s five boroughs and a classic story.

Miranda, writer-composer of Broadway’s global phenomenon “Hamilton,” and Davis, playwright of Pulitzer Prize-nominated “Bulrusher,” released “Warriors” on Oct. 18th. 

“Warriors” blends R&B, ska, hip-hop and of course, musical theater, all while re-working the 1979 cult classic movie of the same name.

“We really wanted to be able to express the multiple New Yorks inside of New York. We wanted to be able to speak to the different cultural influences that are there. And we wanted to just have the fun of having our palette be as wide as possible,” Davis says in an interview with TODAY.com.

For Miranda, “Warriors” marks a full-circle moment, since he first encountered the notoriously violent movie at 4 years old and rewatched it throughout his childhood.

“I think I kept coming back to it because it’s such a picture of this place. It’s both where I lived and also beyond my wildest imaginings,” he says. Plus, he adds, there are “great fight scenes.”

Here’s what to know.

How does the new ‘Warriors’ compare to the original? It’s a ‘love letter,’ not a remake

From its genesis as Xenophon’s “Anabasis,” an Ancient Greek text, to the 1965 novel by Sol Yurick, and ultimately the 1979 movie “the Warriors,” the story that Miranda and Davis transformed proves timeless. 

Each version tells the story of a “fight to get back home,” Miranda says.

In the original movie, a gang from Coney Island — the Warriors — attends a meeting in Van Cortlandt Park set by Cyrus, the respected leader of another gang who wants to foster peace. When they’re framed for Cyrus’ murder, they attempt to make it back to safety in one night.

Miranda and Davis’ album “is a love letter to the film,” but “carves out our own lane,” he says.

The most notable change? In this version, the Warriors are all women.

Miranda says the idea came from a thought exercise that “complicated every plot point” in a “really interesting way.” He asked himself, “What if the Warriors are a female gang trying to fight their way home through New York City at night?’”

“As soon as I made that thought exercise in my head, I couldn’t not do it. Then, the goal was not just changing their names, but really making them lived experiences as women going through this,” he continues.

The change allowed creators to look at a 1979 film from a 2024 perspective, and “root out the misogyny and homophobia” that was initially there, Davis says.

“The story is still mythic and primal. It’s about the responses that we have to violence and adversity and loss. Do we take revenge, or do we try to work for peace? Having happening through women was something that I was really interested in,” she continues.

Their goal was to create a work that’s “distinct” enough to stand alone, instead of one that’s compared to the movie. 

“Anyone who listens to this can tell it’s my favorite film, but you’re not in that uncanny valley of adaptations where you’re like, ‘I’m waiting for them to say my favorite line,’” Miranda says. 

Why a concept album?

Miranda says a concept album format, as opposed to a stage release, allowed them to bring together the album’s star-studded lineup. 

“There’s no way we could get all those artists in one room at the same time, much less eight times a week,” Miranda says. “It allowed us to put a fingerprint of our dream artists for these roles the first time out, and really write to these incredible voices.”

The album features 22 artists, including legends across hip-hop, R&B and Latin music like Lauryn Hill, Marc Anthony, Ghostface Killah, Busta Rhymes and Nas, who serves as a producer. Then, there are Broadway veterans like Amber Gray (“Hadestown”), Sasha Hutchings (“Hamilton”) and Philippa Soo (“Hamilton”). Other names include Colman Domingo, Billy Porter, Michaela Jaé and David Patrick Kelly, who was in the original movie.

The opening number cast five artists from each of New York’s boroughs to represent their home. 

“It’s a mental shift. You guys are not playing yourselves. You’re playing the borough of Brooklyn, the borough of Queens,” Miranda said on TODAY, speaking about how he approached working with artists who often write music for themselves. 

Miranda and Davis gave credit to the actors playing the Warriors for creating the chemistry and cameraderie listeners can likely sense on the album.

“They’re thoroughbreds. They can just do anything that is put in front of them. They instantly create the family, the kind of crew, and the kind of loyalty that we wanted the Warriors to have,” Davis says.

Will ‘The Warriors’ ever come to Broadway?

The plot of “Warriors” unfurls over the course of the album alone, with no additional dialogue needed. 

Despite the clear potential for a musical embedded in “Warriors,” Miranda and Davis aren’t rushing toward a stage production.

This standalone project allows listeners the luxury of digesting the score in a way that’s not always possible with the visuals of a Broadway show, they say.

“People can just be in the sound, and experience it in the same way that we got to write it,” Davis says.

But they get why everyone’s asking about a musical.

“We understand that humans are visual creatures, and they really love seeing things. We’re very open to that possibility, but we’re really just trying to marinate in this moment of this album that we’re so proud of, and letting it be what it is,” Davis says.

“If there’s a show, that’ll be a completely other thing.”