The Sound of the "Tsugai" Comes From the Composer of Hokkaido's Gold Rush
Hiromu Arakawa and BONES. For a certain generation of anime fans, that pairing alone is enough to make you sit up straight. The team that adapted Fullmetal Alchemist twice joined forces a third time in April 2026 with Daemons of the Shadow Realm (Yomi no Tsugai), Arakawa's series from Monthly Shonen Gangan. Now, a little over five months into the broadcast, the full score has finally taken physical form. The "TV Anime Yomi no Tsugai Original Soundtrack" was released on September 16 as a two-CD set with 58 tracks, priced at 3,850 yen (tax included), catalog number SVWC-70793 to 70794. The first-press edition comes in a special three-sided slipcase and includes a booklet with an interview and liner notes by composer Kenichiro Suehiro, which is exactly the kind of package soundtrack obsessives live for.
Hear the name Kenichiro Suehiro and the first thing that comes to mind is probably Golden Kamuy: the score that painted Hokkaido's snowfields and its gold-hunting war with flutes, percussion and earthy voices. And Yomi no Tsugai has Noboru Takagi, the series composer of Golden Kamuy, handling series composition. In other words, this is the Golden Kamuy writing-and-music duo reuniting on Arakawa's new work. Listen to it not just as "Arakawa plus Suehiro" but as "those two, together again," and the weight of those 58 tracks changes completely.
"Sayu-sama," "Kai and Fu": Track Titles as a Blueprint
The six-track "Selected Edition" that was released digitally ahead of the album lists titles such as "The One Who Rules the Tsugai," "Suppression," "Sayu-sama," "Siblings," "'Kai' and 'Fu'" and "The Kagemori Family." Track titles on a score are a blueprint of how the composer and the production team broke the work down. Here you can see the axis of protagonists Yuru and Asa as "siblings," the axis of faith in the paired "Sayu-sama," and the axis of the core concept of the powers, "Kai" (release) and "Fu" (seal), each standing as an independent piece. The skeleton of the story itself has been set as music, which suggests a highly structural score that prepares separate character themes and concept themes.
On Golden Kamuy, Suehiro said in an official interview that he concluded he "didn't need to force Ainu elements," using the ethnic instruments and voices he studied on a research trip in a deliberately limited way, while putting first "cool music that lets the entertainment value of the intense battles and modern gags come alive." Heavy use of flutes such as tin whistle and quena, a lot of percussion for that earthy feel, the tonkori and mukkuri, and a Bulgarian-voice-style vocal sound. Rather than pasting on signifiers of "authenticity," he makes them serve the work's entertainment backbone. How that stance is applied to Yomi no Tsugai, a story where twins who divide day and night, village and city, folklore and modern battle all coexist, is the first thing I want to read about in that booklet interview.
From "We Married as a Job!" to "Re:ZERO": A Composer Who Keeps Crossing Borders
Kenichiro Suehiro was born in 1980 in Saitama City. He played guitar, keyboards and drums in bands from his teens, was gradually drawn to instrumental music, and set his sights on composition under the influence of Ennio Morricone. He studied composition and orchestration with Taro Iwashiro and Tetsunori Osawa, a background that explains why his scores carry the body heat of rock and the architecture of an orchestra at the same time.
Look at his filmography and the range is startling. In TV drama: We Married as a Job! (Nigehaji), Okitegami Kyoko no Biboroku, My Housekeeper Nagisa-san. In anime: the Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- series, Fire Force, Goblin Slayer II, Uncle from Another World. In film: the Ushijima the Loan Shark series. The lightness of a Sunday-night romance and the crushing repetition of despair in another world, written by the same person. Yomi no Tsugai needs both: the everyday life of a boy in a rural village, a battle of powers that erupts in the city, and the otherworldly beings called Tsugai. That Suehiro is neither "a live-action drama composer" nor "an anime composer" but a border-crossing one is a clear strength for this series.
Behind the Star-Studded Theme Songs, What the Score Carries
Yomi no Tsugai also stood out for the star power of its theme songs. In the first cour, Vaundy sang the opening "Tobu Toki" and yama sang the ending "Tobou yo," both written and composed by Vaundy. The second cour brought Masanori Ota's "back shot" as the opening and Kei Sugawara's "Kujaku" as the ending. Against a 90-second entrance and exit lined with the front row of J-pop, it is Suehiro's score that carries the twenty-odd minutes in between. If the theme songs are the face of a work, the score is its body temperature. The original manga placed second in the comics category of the "Next Manga Award 2023" and passed three million copies in circulation by its eighth volume. Across two consecutive cours, 58 tracks kept lifting that story with sound, and now they have finally been separated from the picture and handed to us.
Personally, I want to start with "Sayu-sama." What instruments and voices did Suehiro use to raise that concept where faith and dread live side by side? And how much of the "earthy sound" toolkit he built on Golden Kamuy is in play? The third Arakawa-BONES collaboration could well be an event on the musical side too. Before you press play on disc one, I strongly recommend reading the Suehiro interview in the booklet first.
