Teaser
So having had a listen to the entirety of the near-final version of the ~thing that will be released~, here’s my thoughts:
- Length. I haven’t personally calculated it but I’m fairly confident that this album has the longest average song length of any of the main HS volumes so far, or close to it. As I teased before, this album will have the longest HS song I’ve ever made on it (which is coincidentally also a way of canonizing my favorite ship), but there are a number of songs by others that are *even* longer than that.
- Quality. Remember how earlier volumes would usually have 1 or 2 ‘epic’ songs (what you could call ‘animationbait’) like Rex Duodecim Angelus, Courser or Cascade? This album has several of them. There really is an unprecedented sense of effort on the part of the musicians, and many of the songs truly feel like they could have an entire animation built around them.
- Variety/Genre. It’s been a long time since volume 1 through 4. Though many of the earlier songs are no doubt iconic, they tended to gravitate towards chiptunes and had a general emphasis on synthesized sounds. And don’t worry, tracks like that are still there, but there’s so much more! We’re talking expertly orchestrated symphonies, live choirs, affectionately performed jazz pieces, hard rocking guitars and peppy electronic dance music.
- How far we’ve come. Despite said diversity in genres, the album feels remarkably coherent and consistent as a whole. We even have some musicians from the early days returning after an absence, so the album is a great capstone to HS music in its entirety and does a great job of representing how everyone involved has continually developed as an artist through all this time. The album definitely has a sense of nostalgia and finality about it, if only for the fact that some of us have really gone out of our way in terms of effort placed into the music as a kind of final goodbye, but at the same time doesn’t feel sappy or melancholic at all.
So speaking as objectively as I realistically can, I think this is one of the best HS albums ever, and I sincerely hope that everyone will enjoy it as much when it’s released as I did listening to it just now.