Beautiful World (Evangelion: 1.0 theme — by Utada Hikaru)

ZAQ's reading of "Beautiful World" takes Utada Hikaru's hushed, breath-close Evangelion 1.0 theme and refracts it through an anison sensibility — brighter attack, more forward momentum, a vocalist who built her name on opening-sequence intensity rather than bedroom intimacy. Where Utada let the melody hang in fragile suspension, ZAQ pushes air into it, her tone clear and slightly metallic, carrying the kind of projection that survives over a full band rather than a single piano. The arrangement leans synthier and more propulsive, trading the original's aching restraint for a sense of forward thrust that suits her register. Lyrically the song remains about precarious tenderness — the fear of holding something beautiful that could vanish, the half-prayer of "if I could," the ambivalence of wanting closeness while bracing for loss. That emotional core (so bound to Shinji's withdrawn longing in the film) stays intact, but ZAQ frames it as something to be sung outward rather than withheld. The cultural weight is doubled: a beloved Utada standard and an Evangelion touchstone, reinterpreted by an artist who is herself an anime-music institution. It lands best for the listener who knows the original by heart and wants to hear its sorrow re-lit with more nerve — late-night, headphones, the credits of a rewatch rolling in the mind.