Kensuke Ushio: The underrated genius of anime music
- 5 days ago
- 9 min read
Most of us familiar with anime music have heard of Joe Hisaishi. How about Hiroyuki Sawano, or Yoko Kanno? Most likely, you have. But how about Kensuke Ushio? Even if the name doesn't ring a bell, you may have had the pleasure of hearing his music. As recently as last year in fact, if you were among the millions who watched the Chainsaw Man movie. Most notably with "in the pool", a stunning and pivotal piano and string piece. In this article, we'll explore three of Ushio’s most popular pieces, and why they are so captivating. I'll sprinkle in quotes from his 2024 NHK interview throughout, and use my own piano scores to illustrate the theory. Let's start with some background on Mr. Ushio.
Kensuke Ushio was born in 1983 in Tokyo, Japan. He learned piano as a child, studied music in his formative years, and gained recognition as an electronic musician under the name "Agraph", beginning in 2007. In the 2010s he moved into anime composition, his first projects being Space Dandy and Ping Pong the Animation, both in 2014.
lit (2016, A Silent Voice)
"I'm not interested in making good melodies or harmonies or rhythms. The texture of a single sound can make you see or feel something."
In this film, one of the main characters has a hearing disability. Much of the story revolves around how she is treated, and the fallout drives the other main character to the brink of ending his own life. In other words, it starts on a depressing note, but as it goes on it digs deeper into the conflicts between the characters, why they happen, and how they might be solved.
Mr. Ushio knew exactly what to do here. Hisaishi has his signature melodies, Sawano his epic drops, but in this tender soundtrack Ushio places you inside his own little bubble of imagination. It's extremely simple, yet everything feels intended. Every note. Every accent. Every silence. At the end of the day, that's all music is. It resonates with us because it conveys the characters' feelings so effectively. That might seem like the obvious goal for any composer, but Ushio strips his own musical identity down to a far lower level, letting us feel exactly how he reads the material, rather than something coloured by his own style and mannerisms.
"svg" deserves a mention. It plays towards the end of the film, as our characters are striving to become their best selves, and it captures that moment perfectly. Not outright positive, but carrying a gentle, wistful optimism. Much of that comes from its unhurried pulse (a steady 90 bpm) and its quietly looping, repeated patterns, which lends it the circular quality of a fond memory. And although the piece never leaves the major key, it refuses to sound completely upbeat. Its maj7 chords (that soft clash of the B sitting a semitone beneath the C) introduce a tender dissonance, while its repeated pull towards E minor and its unresolved suspended chords colour the warmth with longing. "Sunlight" is another standout. Though it never actually appears in the film, it's my favourite melancholic track on the score. It slowly builds a theme before erupting into what I'd call a musical sunburst. But I'm getting off track. Let's look at the most popular piece from the film: lit.
"The last song, 'lit', which was only played twice, means 'light'. This movie, which is about achieving the light, ended with this song attached."
For me, this is the piece that put Ushio on the map. It corresponds perfectly with what's happening on screen. It opens gently: a lilting 3/4 sway in E major, the melody circling just a handful of notes over soft, warm harmony. It's an I–iii–♭VII–IV loop, and that borrowed ♭VII (a D major chord leaning briefly outside the key) lends a wistful, nostalgic glow. The restraint mirrors our main character as he slowly begins to accept the people around him, a change taking root in his mind. The harmony even sinks for a stretch into the relative minor (C♯m), shading the warmth before the light returns. Then it grows. And here's the genius of it: the melodic cell never changes. It is transformed instead by everything around it. The texture thickens, the register splits open across five octaves down to a deep bass, the tempo quickens, and the dynamics swell from a near-whisper to fortissimo. By the climax it bursts into a myriad of colours as he finally opens his heart, the same tune now reharmonised into a soaring IV–V–vi–I, the most affirming cadence in the tonal language, resolving at last home to E major: the tonic, the "light", finally arrived at. It's the same melody throughout, but now with life, energy and spirit pumped into it, changed not by a single altered note but by being given everything it was missing before.
If svg is the held breath that never resolves, lit is the exhale. Bigger, more openly emotional, warmer, and resolved at the end. These tracks carry something special to me. Something that music theory can support and explain, yet that can only really come from someone composing straight from his own heart. The feeling of wanting to better yourself. To strive for a good life. And I think that's beautiful.
Love Theme (2024)
"I make music that isn't complete until it's combined with the dialogue, sound effects and visuals."
Building onto what we've learned about Ushio so far, let's lean into a more dramatic setting: Dandadan. A bombastic, non-stop hijinks manga and anime that fans could finally watch brought to life in 2024. Ushio rose to the challenge with an extremely diverse, whimsical, and energetic soundtrack. Where his A Silent Voice writing drew its bittersweetness purely from within the key, here he reaches for a darker, more chromatic palette. We'll focus on the most famous cue, the "Love Theme" from episode 7, dubbed "To a Kinder World" by fans when it came out.
This piece is longer and more complex, and it tells a story as it unfolds. From the opening bars it refuses to commit to a home key: notated in C major but pulling constantly toward E and A minor, with chromatic leading-tones colouring even the gentlest chords. It floats, rootless and searching, capturing exactly the unease beneath the warmth of the mother and daughter on screen. It's cast as a slow 3/4, a waltz, the metre of the ballet itself, and as the daughter begins to practise, the accompaniment blossoms into flowing arpeggios and the texture thickens: the warmth turns into a dance. But Ushio threads foreboding through it. Beneath the dance, an augmented chord keeps surfacing, a sonority that, by dividing the octave evenly, has no stable root and can never settle. It's the harmonic shadow of the mother's unseen sacrifice, and of the fate we already sense coming. It builds, it swells… and then it stops. The full texture collapses back to the bare, wandering figures of the opening as we're shown Silky's fate. The music quite literally empties out.
Then we're drawn back into the ballet, but this time the swell is never broken. The chromatic lament bass from earlier (A–G♯–G–F) returns, now sinking an octave lower, to the very bottom of the piano, repeating as the texture builds to a true triple-forte, while Silky dances to her death in memory of her daughter. It comes to rest not in the light of a major chord, but in A minor. Then a single, lone high note hangs above the silence, like a last breath, or a thread of light left behind.
It's another masterful piece, but instead of building to one single grand moment, it tells a complete story. Once again I'm struck by how interwoven it is with the scene, and how well it complements it. It's gorgeous on its own, yet never truly complete without the visuals and story behind it.
Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc (2025)
"I make music to convey what can't be explained in words, so what am I trying to do?"
Another dramatic piece, "in the pool". This time it opens on a much calmer, more melancholic note. Ushio casts it in a rolling 12/8: a compound, triplet-swung metre whose gentle lapping motion is the shifting water of the pool as we enter Denji's world. The opening rocks between just two chords, a IV–I plagal sway (Amaj7- Emaj7) that never quite resolves, light glancing off the surface, hypnotic and unanchored. The hidden context of his encounter undoubtedly flavours it: even in the calm, the harmony refuses to settle into clean E major, clouded by chromatic, borrowed colours (the key is so ambiguous it's barely pin-downable). As for the main melody, to me it carries a feeling of longing, perhaps Denji's own. And there's a real mechanism beneath that: it keeps leaning on a half-diminished chord (D♯m7♭5), the most plaintive sonority in the tonal language, the same aching, unfulfilled sound composers have used to voice longing for centuries. It returns again and again, almost as Denji's personal motif.
As the music rises, we feel his pulse and excitement climbing: the texture thickens from a handful of notes a bar to two dozen, the bass sinks lower, the dynamics build. It's a more intimate correlation than the Love Theme, because this is the protagonist we've followed for the whole story, and the writing makes it first-person. That single rolling lilt and that one recurring longing-chord are his. As we hit bar 22, the swell peaks, the harmony plunging onto the relative minor (C♯m7) and the bass dropping into its lowest register, as he realises he has a chance with this Reze girl, and that he must choose between her and Makima. Then, perfectly in line with the instant comedy of the series, the music simply stops. A full bar of silence, a build set up for a huge payoff and then cut to nothing, as Denji reveals his choice was made easily after all.
Then it builds again as he's slowly coerced into the pool, a brief metric hiccup (the metre halving to 6/8 for a single bar) marking the seam. And finally, just as he hits the water, it explodes, straight out of a bar of silence into the densest, loudest writing in the entire piece, the dynamics striking the absolute ceiling. The longing that had been building inside him is finally set free. From there it evolves as the encounter grows: the harmony turns restless and far-ranging, secondary dominants and borrowed chords dragging it ever further from home while the bass descends to the very bottom of the keyboard. Then it returns to the chords of the reflecting water, the opening's gentle IV–I sway recapitulated, as we again glimpse the spider, Reze giving Denji her promise… The piece closes not on a resolution but hanging on an unresolved dominant: no closure, only suspense. Something is coming.
The irony of this article is that I've tried to do exactly what Ushio says I can't: explain his music in words. If you've seen the film, you know this doesn't do it justice. The fact that I had to write this elaborate piece just to attempt it should be proof enough. This track sits even more snugly inside the on-screen material than the previous two, filled with Denji's private emotions, something you can only truly feel by seeing the world through his eyes alongside him. It's no wonder this has become perhaps his most popular work yet.
Final thoughts
Lined up side by side, the three pieces map out a journey of their own. In "lit", Ushio never once leaves the key; the whole bittersweet ache is conjured from inside a plain major, and the music earns its way home to a bright, resolved tonic. In "Love Theme" he reaches outside the key, letting chromatic colour and a centuries-old lament bass pull the music down into minor, into death and finality. And in "in the pool" he keeps that darker, chromatic palette but refuses to resolve it at all, leaving us hanging on a single unanswered chord, all longing and no closure. Enlightenment, grief, and desire. Three completely different emotional ends, reached with the same deliberate craft, and not one of them sounding too much like the other. That, more than anything, is the Ushio signature: the absence of one.
It's worth sitting with that idea. Many of the composers mentioned above have a style that pins them down, and while it makes them recognizable and reliable, there's something restrictive about it too. That's one of the main reasons I love Ushio's work so much. He seems to tailor the music entirely around the project, so completely that you might not even recognize a signature. You notice only that the score blends seamlessly with the material and gives it voice. At the end of the day, that's what makes him a master composer, and one we'll keep hearing in this industry for years to come.
Would you like to play pieces of music introduced here?
Over 500,000 sheets with various songs and instruments, and 15 different local payment methods, mymusic5 provides the most convenient platform service for those of you who love music.
Comments