On October 1, a Youth Where "Eyes Never Meet" Starts Sounding Again
Based on Tsukiko's manga and broadcast on TBS from April 2026, The Ice Guy and the Cool Girl—known in Japan as Kori no Joheki—returns for a second season starting October 1, 2026, airing across 28 TBS-affiliated stations every Thursday at 23:56. The newly released teaser visual traps a single uneasy mood in one frame: Koyuki, Miki, Minato and Yota each cast their gaze in a different direction, never meeting. Slipping music into this delicate ensemble drama is the duo returning from season one, Kanade Sakuma and Natsumi Tabuchi, with soundtrack production by Nichion.
A Duo, Two Very Different Roots
What makes this pairing interesting is how differently the two arrived here. Kanade Sakuma, born in 1997 in Saitama, moved from the Kunitachi College of Music high school into the college's composition course, where he built work around atonal music and contemporary-music techniques—an avant-garde lineage. Yet he has also written plenty of music for the living room: the title sound logo and BGM for TBS's Ravit!, dramas such as Hidamari ga Kikoeru (2024) and Kanojo to Kareshi no Akarui Mirai (2024), and NHK BS Premium's Banjo no Himawari (2019). Natsumi Tabuchi, born in 1989 in Okayama, came the "royal road" of scoring, graduating from the film and broadcast music course of Tokyo College of Music's composition and conducting major. The two had already co-composed the film version of My Next Life as a Villainess, and Kori no Joheki pours that chemistry into a story of adolescence.
Ears That Passed Through "Atonality," Measuring the Temperature of Youth
Scoring an ensemble youth drama is, in truth, very hard. With no flashy battles or magic, the music has to support the "ma"—the silence, the hesitation, the words left unsaid. This is where Sakuma's contemporary-music background pays off, I suspect. Chords nudged slightly off from tonality, resonances left hanging without resolution—these depict "the unreachable distance despite closeness" between these teenagers far more eloquently than melody could explain. If Tabuchi's structural sense, honed in drama and film scoring, gives that a skeleton, the emotion never runs away, yet it genuinely aches. How far will the sonic texture built in season one push from October? I'll quietly wait for the moment those "eyes that never meet" become sound.
Why "Two-Composer Teams" Are on the Rise
Over the past few years, more TV series have split or co-written their scores across multiple composers rather than leaning on one. On long-running shows where the number of required cues balloons into the dozens, dividing the work between writers of different styles widens the palette far more than one person shouldering the deadline and volume alone ever could. A duo like Sakuma and Tabuchi—one handling experimental resonance, the other a sturdy structure—is exactly that ideal. It's also worth noting how Nichion, as a soundtrack-production house, gathers the two into a single project and bundles their sonic direction. In an era when a composer's name is talked about as a work's "signboard," this kind of team formation is itself proof that the craft of scoring is changing. What cue sheet will season two be built on, and if a soundtrack album appears, whose pen sounded in which scene? There's no shortage of things to chase.
