Daddy! Daddy! Do!

Masayuki Suzuki brings decades of Japanese pop sophistication to this opening theme for Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, creating something that reads simultaneously as loving pastiche and genuine craft. The production is deliberately retro — bright brass, tight rhythm section, falsetto vocal runs in the chorus that reference classic soul and city pop with obvious pleasure. Suzuki, known as the "King of Romance" in Japan, delivers the vocal performance with the ease of someone performing in their native genre, the technical demands of the track (which are considerable) disappearing into apparent naturalness. The song's function within the anime is comedic — the grandiosity of the arrangement is proportional to the grandiosity with which the main characters treat their romantic maneuvering — but the musical execution is entirely sincere, which is precisely what makes the joke work. "Daddy! Daddy! Do!" operates as a piece of genuinely excellent pop music that happens to also be funny because it is excellent. The horn arrangements in particular carry a craftsmanship that rewards attention, the individual lines doing interesting things that the overall texture doesn't advertise. Culturally this is the intersection of 1980s Japanese city pop aesthetics and Western soul music, filtered through contemporary anime's relationship with nostalgia as affectionate performance rather than literal return. Best experienced at volume, in daylight, with some degree of physical energy available for deployment.