Kenshi Yonezu/Hachi - Raven

Natalie.mu, August 15th, 2026 (Original Article)

Getting Back to Back Then - A Soft Wind Blowing Through a Structure

Kenshi Yonezu has released his new song Raven on streaming.

Raven is a new song written as the theme song for 2026 NHK Soccer. Having had a love of soccer for some time, what considerations did Yonezu have about this request, and what ideas did he build from?

In this Natalie.mu interview, while digging into Yonezu's love of soccer, we asked about everything he put into this song: the refreshing texture of the sound, the lyrics that spell out his own way of life and thoughts as an individual, the relation of the titular "raven," and more.

— I'm aware that you have a fondness for soccer, Yonezu-san - can I ask how that originated?

I got into soccer about 10 years ago basically on a whim. I did play just a tiny bit of soccer around first grade or so, but doing things as a group didn't agree with me at the time, so I think I quit before even going for a full year. I never took any notice of soccer after that, but when I suddenly tried watching some one day, once again I had this discovery of like, "huh, so soccer is this interesting." Ever since then, watching soccer games has remained a pastime of mine.

— Right, you did mention getting into soccer back in your Horse and Deer interview as well. So I guess you've been into watching soccer all that time?

That's right. Living my day-to-day life, nearly all of my various hobbies feel like they get absorbed into my music work and other activities, yet soccer alone was something that had absolutely no connection to my career, existing in my life as a pure hobby. And indeed, soccer has an excitement to it that isn't at all present in my own life. That applies to any team sport, really - players giving their all run around the pitch, and the moment they score a point, the whole stadium is filled with elated cheering. That kind of excitement doesn't exist in at least my music career, I think. The closest thing to it would be live shows, but even then, there isn't really the sort of momentary rush of heat that makes you forget yourself and rejoice like that. In a sense, it's somewhere very distant from myself, so it looks all the more beautiful. I think that might be another part of why I came to love soccer.

— With you saying that, I suppose doing a theme song for NHK soccer must have been a rather difficult task. What was your first impression upon receiving the request?

I've listened to theme songs like that on TV since I was a child, so part of me has always wondered whether I could fill that role myself and wanted to try. My friend King Gnu did it, so I was really interested in what kind of song I'd end up with if I did it. It was truly an honor to receive the opportunity.

— There are many different ways to enjoy soccer beyond just cheering for national games, such as being a supporter of local teams or following certain players. What sort of ways do you interact with soccer?

When you put it like that, I think I'm a little different from what most people would call a "supporter." Like, it's not like I'm finding a favorite team and watching focused on them. It feels like I have favorite individual players, and put my focus on each of them. My favorite is actually a player named (Kevin) De Bruyne.

— What about De Bruyne do you like?

Including him being about the same age as me, I sometimes think to myself that if I were a soccer player, De Bruyne would be my ideal. Looking at individual players like that, and then following the structure of what's happening on the pitch, or with the team managers and owners, is really interesting to me too.

— The culture of soccer has a wide variety of beloved anthems and songs. When you get into soccer, I imagine you become increasingly familiar with the link between soccer and music. How do you view that?

Around the start of the year, I went to England, and saw a major game between Manchester City and Liverpool. Liverpool treats You'll Never Walk Alone like a team anthem, and they in fact played it before the game started. Seeing everyone hold up towels and such for it, I felt something sublime. That song has so much of Liverpool's history squeezed into it. And also, it goes to show how suited music is for expressing the extraordinary, and how it can deeply shake people's feelings. It can induce a state of excitement, or even do the opposite, naturally. Actually hearing that song playing in the stadium made me feel anew what incredible power music has.

— Watching soccer with such a close eye, and even experiencing its various anthems, I imagine you had to give a lot of thought to what choices to make in writing an NHK soccer theme. What did you think about first when making the song?

It's difficult to know how to talk about this, but first of all, a major consideration was that, in this time full of unrest, I didn't feel up for writing a song with a straightforward theme of unity or devotion, or "winning over an enemy." Especially when it's for an international event like the World Cup. That said, soccer is strictly entertainment, and I myself love the sport of soccer. I have a strong desire to support the people taking part in it as much as possible. In sports, winning is a fundamental imperative, so the quick and easy approach would be to affirm winning itself, but I wanted to somehow avoid leaving it as only that. Thinking about what my approach should be, then, it occurred to me that it would be better to affirm, within a narrow scope, people's individual ways of living and being. Simply put, soccer has matches that are country versus country, or team versus team. Matches are competitions in which each side aims to beat the other, and they produce a winner and a loser. This is an inescapable destiny for those who choose to play the sport of soccer. That said, that's simply a fact inherent to the structure of all sports, and exists some distance away from the individual players. That being the case, I wondered how possible it would be to analyze that based on what's inside those individuals. I had this sense that the destiny of there being a winner and a loser, and the need to be the side that wins, coexists with a personal way of being which is detached from that, yet doesn't contradict it. Though players belong to a group with a shared objective of "winning," they exist as distinct individuals, in such a way that doesn't take away from what everyone has staked on it. I wondered if I could work with something like that. If I was going to be making a soccer theme song now, I thought maybe I could send a little draft of wind blowing through that structure. That's the feeling I had while making it.

— It occurs to me that the image of a "draft of wind" you just described is really well-represented by the sound as well. It's a very invigorating song with a ventilated feel, and moreso than sweat and heat, it makes me picture greenery and natural views. The strings, flutes, and harpsichord give a strong impression of live instrumentation.

Actually, in the first place, my internal picture of soccer themes is rather rock-centric. Something like Seven Nation Army, say...

— The White Stripes' Seven Nation Army is an anthem with a gallant feel, using powerful guitar riffs, which people will loudly sing together in chorus. It's unquestionably a song of unity.

That's right. That's an association I feel strongly. Maybe the truth is that a song along those lines would be more fitting, but at the moment, I truly just thought that for an international event about getting active with real, non-fictional humans, I couldn't bring myself to make a song with a gallant, possibly even aggressive sound. I simply want to stack up things that are like "hey, let's head over there for a bit." I think that's more or less where I started from.

— I had the sense that the lyrics were written about yourself. What were you thinking about when writing them?

Naturally, I did make it around the axis of being a soccer theme, but as you say, I believe that they meanwhile ended up becoming extremely personal lyrics. The events matter-of-factly described in the lyrics are almost entirely real experiences of mine, or else things that I saw and heard in close proximity to me. That's been an approach that suits my current mode lately. I'm growing older year by year, gaining complexity, and becoming a somewhat harder person. Yet it's not like my self from when I was a child has gone away. That was something I didn't know until I became an adult - I've reached an age where I can start to feel like, "turns out adults are way more like little kids than I thought." Since sometime last year, I've been doing a bunch that feels like I'm going back to childhood. I'll buy strategy guides for games I played long ago and read them, dig out the old mobile phone I used to use, all sorts of stuff like that. In a way, I've been trying to find my way back to my own life.

— I see.

I'm not talking about simple nostalgia or anything. Even if you find your way back there, you can't follow the same paths, and as a result, you'll often see new sights. I've frequently felt things like that from last year to this year. Thus, I've really come to think I should treasure "first ones," so to speak. When you build a huge monument by stacking Lego blocks, it grows in complexity, the size gets bigger, and the first block you placed gets so buried you can no longer see it. But even so, by no means did that first block disappear. It occurred to me that I'd like to put that sort of notion into this song.

— If the goal was to write lyrics narrowly focused on an individual's way of being, you could have also, for instance, come up with a particular fictional soccer player to be the protagonist and write a story. But you didn't opt to do that. With the initial line being "in the worlds of manga I always looked at as a child," indicating your own "first one," I'm wondering if that ties into the temperature of this song.

That's true. If I'm writing something that's like inner thoughts analyzing a structure, it kind of felt like it wouldn't be fair if I didn't talk about myself, or wouldn't feel like I was being sincere. Like, I should strictly talk about myself - making it a story about a fictional soccer player or something feels like it would be going too far. After all, I'm not a player on the pitch nor a manager, so I'm in no position to speak for their feelings; I can only be a clamp connecting the spectators.to the scene The people on the pitch, players, managers, and helpers included, all have different ways of thinking, and I imagine some want to fight carrying everything on their shoulders. I don't want to come in recklessly and do anything that would reject them. Thus, the only thing I can do is, through the framework of being a theme song for this event, blow just a little breeze through the structure as I objectively see it. And to do that, I realized I really ought to be talking about myself.

— The things you've been talking about are expressed rather directly in the lyrics from the chorus. The two lines "Just for now, let's go somewhere you can't hear anyone's voice / Tuck the group message away into a desk, and head toward the clear blue" really speak to "being an individual." I think it's very meaningful to sing something like this in a soccer theme song.

A "group message" is obviously something created to wish blessings upon its recipient, so I don't mean to recklessly reject it, but on the other hand, it can sometimes act like a curse. The more sincerity something is made with, the heavier an anchor it can be on the recipient, I think. As a soccer fan, of course I want them to win, and I'll celebrate like a fiend should they actually become the champions, but it's not like I want to deify the emotional story that this produces. In order to affirm being an individual within a group, I felt that I had to include a line like this to make it work, myself being on the side of the fans who would write a group message.

— I believe an important part of the chorus lyrics is the phrase "getting back on track." It's not simply "arriving at" or "looking back on." Rather than merely thinking back on childhood or interacting with nostalgic things, I think "getting back on track" has a different nuance.

This is getting personal again, but from last year to this year, I've been working on music with a mindset of going back to how I felt as a child, making music feeling how I did in middle school sitting by myself in front of a multi-track recorder, and indeed, getting back on that track. And what's occurred to me trying that is, just because I got back on that track doesn't mean I'm reaching the exact same place as back then. It feels like I'm arriving at nostalgic places that even I don't know. It made me think how untangling myself, sort of purifying myself from within, is really important. Just calling it "going back to when I was a child" might make it sound selfish, but it's really not like that. I take a look back at "yeah, this is how I was as a child." I dismantle that, and examine the so-called "first Lego bricks" within me. Through doing that, I can discover a new me. It's not like I'm irresponsibly making careless remarks; I'm taking what I've built up as an adult and my childhood self and clicking them together to arrive at something ascendant, a sort of ultimate form. My thinking that "get back on track" was a really good way of putting that might have been part of why it showed up here.

— I think Plazma (released January 2025) and 1991 (released October 2025) are that type of song too, so I imagine it's a common theme of yours, not just for Raven.

That's true. Even I'm not entirely sure how it became like that, but looking back again, I realized I really was a strangely-behaving child. I'd forgotten until recently, but from age 13 to 23, I never once went to a barbershop or hair salon. I hated other people cutting my hair, so for ten years I cut it myself. I just suddenly remembered that. Part of me sort of shivered a bit thinking "way for someone like that to have managed to live in society." But I think I should show a bit more affection to that strangely-behaving childhood self of mine. That sort of self is still inside of me now. I think it's cruelty to have forgotten that; I want to properly face him, thank him, heal him, or else I can't keep earnestly making music. That's the feeling I've operated under.

— Let me ask about the song title, Raven. I imagine many people will see that and imagine the emblem of the Japan Football Association, the three-legged crow, or Yatagarasu. As for yourself, how did you arrive at choosing this motif?

Of course, there being a crow in the official emblem was a major reason for the motif, but at the same time, I also just personally like crows and ravens. I'm sure I've mentioned this several times in interviews before, but I once tried to become friends with crows. There were crows on the roof of the place I lived at the time, and I came to establish a communication with them. Crows are smart, so they really are able to communicate. As I spent my days doing that, I would sometimes have crows tap-tap-tapping on my window while I was sleeping in my room. The curtains were even closed, so I was impressed they knew I was there. To me, crows have that sort of vibe of a familiar friend. It might simply come down to an innocent feeling of "crows are great."

— Was there also a notion of them in your mind as free creatures who aren't shouldering anything?

That's true. As well as them being so-called scavengers, who are prone to being despised. But in reality, crows are really pretty when you look at them up close. Amid the jet black feathers, they can reflect a faint rainbow-ish light. With them liking to collect sparkly things, too, I picture them as friendly. Even the way they aren't strictly thought of as beautiful is something I kind of like.

— Let me ask one last thing. What sort of song do you feel Raven became, in your eyes?

If you ask me what sort of song it is to me, I feel like I'm still not able to see it very objectively yet. Still, I've always thought "I want to make pop," and this song does fit into that, but it doesn't feel like it's facing outward much. It might seem like it is at a glance, but I really strongly feel the impression that it was made thinking back on "that was how things were back then." Of course, being a soccer theme song, I believe I made something up to the task of playing that part, yet how it will be received once it's put out into the world is a different story... I very much had that mindset. Doing all I could to speak very personally about something broad. I have this mindset of "that's what it's like, huh."

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