Ano - Guitar, Loneliness and Blue Planet

This opening theme announces itself with the specific cheerfulness of someone who is almost but not quite comfortable with being cheerful — there is a wobble in the brightness that makes it feel real rather than performed. Ano's vocal delivery is one of the most distinctive things in recent anime music: she occupies a register somewhere between speaking and singing, with a conversational intimacy that makes the production feel like it is being made up on the spot even when it is clearly carefully constructed. The guitars are jangly and forward in the mix, driving the song with an indie-rock energy that owes debts to both Japanese underground music and early-2000s Western guitar pop without sounding derivative of either. The rhythm section is propulsive without being aggressive, giving the track a bounce that sits just on the playful side of earnest. The song's subject is the paradox at the heart of Bocchi the Rock! itself — that creative longing and social isolation are not opposites but the same thing, that the guitar is both what separates the narrator from the world and the thing that might eventually connect her to it. Blue Planet functions as a concept of impossible distance and also of shared atmosphere — everyone breathing the same air even when they feel entirely alone. The song is best listened to at the exact moment when something isolating has just, very slightly, begun to feel like it might be possible to leave behind.