ULTRA SOUL

The most anthemic and most inescapable song B'z ever wrote — a track engineered for mass unison shouting and successful beyond any reasonable expectation, still played at ballparks and sports broadcasts a quarter century on. The riff is deliberately elemental, a descending hard-rock figure with a swaggering half-time strut, produced bright and forward with drums pushed high and guitars stacked for maximum wall. Matsumoto's solo is compact and melodic, prioritizing singability over technique, which is the whole design philosophy here. Inaba delivers the verses with a bitten, percussive attack and then vaults into that titular shout, an English phrase of no fixed meaning that functions purely as a release valve — the point is the shape of the vowel in a crowd's mouth, not its definition. The lyric is a plainspoken exhortation to break through: the world is heavy, dawn comes anyway, get up and burn. Written for the 2001 World Aquatics Championships, it has become Japan's default sound of exertion and victory, the thing that plays when someone crosses a finish line. Correct listening scenario: the last kilometer of a run, or a room full of people who all yell the same syllable at the same moment.