KICK BACK (Chainsaw Man OP — 2022 carry)

Kenshi Yonezu arrives at "KICK BACK" with the energy of someone who has completely abandoned restraint. The production is a collision of eras — crunchy guitar riffs that feel lifted from 1990s punk-rock radio crash into hyper-compressed, modern J-pop drum patterns, and the result is something almost cartoonishly violent in the best way. Yonezu's voice oscillates between a knowing sneer and a falsetto that sounds genuinely unhinged, riding the tempo like he might lose control at any second but never quite does. The song is fundamentally about desire in its most absurd form: wanting everything, wanting it immediately, knowing how ridiculous that sounds, and leaning into the ridiculousness anyway. It belongs to a particular moment in anime-adjacent music where the opening theme became a cultural event in itself, and this one understood the assignment completely — it sounds like the inside of someone's skull mid-adrenaline spike. You reach for it when you need to feel reckless without consequences, when you're commuting and want your walk to feel like a montage, or when something went badly and you need momentum more than comfort.