Thirty Years Later, Still No Light

The soundtrack to Akira has no interest in comfort. Geino Yamashirogumi built something mechanical and ritualistic and wrong—music that sounds like a city breathing through damaged lungs—and Shoji Yamashiro kept it airless and relentless beneath the entire film. It’s not accompaniment; it’s the same substance as the animation, the same panic and concrete weight. Watch the opening bike chase with the sound off and you’ll understand what’s missing: it still moves, it’s still beautiful, but something essential is gone.

Katsuhiro Otomo made the film in 1988 and it arrived fully formed, a vision of Neo-Tokyo as a place where the future had already rotted from within—sprawling, violent, gorgeous, and entirely without hope. That it still holds this way, thirty years on, says something about how precisely he calibrated the despair. This isn’t dystopia as genre exercise. It’s dystopia as consequence.

The tribute album 30 Years Later is an interesting problem to have. You can’t improve on the source and you probably shouldn’t try. What Wolf Arm, Acidulé, Speed Machine, Carbon Killer, AWITW, and Gregorio Franco are doing here is something more like translation—taking those melodic structures and running them through a different register, neon-soaked and analog-warm where Yamashiro was cold and ceremonial. The synthwave idiom can sand off exactly the roughness that makes the original work, but when these tracks keep their edges, when they remember that Neo-Tokyo is supposed to feel like the end of something rather than a cool aesthetic, they’re genuinely good.

It’s on Bandcamp. A dollar well spent on a grey evening when you want to feel like the future already happened and it looked exactly like this.