Iwasaki composed the music for Akame ga kill!, an action series where combat is frequently fatal. His scoring matches that register: heavy percussion, choir and electric guitar deployed without restraint, alongside quieter string writing for the aftermath of each death.
He is a Japanese composer who has scored an unusually wide range of animation across three decades, from historical action to comedy to mecha. Rock, hip hop, orchestral and choral traditions all appear, frequently within a single score, and he writes vocal tracks with lyrics in several languages including invented ones, which has become a signature.
Recurring subjects: escalation, themes that build through repetition to an overwhelming statement, and stylistic collision treated as a compositional tool. He writes battle music that is instantly identifiable and slower material that is genuinely restrained, and he is unusually good at scoring a tonal shift within a single scene without the seam showing.
His scores for a mecha series about drills and determination and for a historical swordsman series are among the most recognised in animation, and several of his themes function as shorthand for the shows themselves. His willingness to combine idioms has been widely imitated in the medium.
For listeners who want animation scoring at full volume. Suited to anyone approaching the action series, and to those who should follow it with his mecha work, which is louder still and considerably stranger.
