Provided: opinions on pop-rock, football chants, stop-starting…

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Sonia Yang: When Radwimps’ drummer announced he was going on hiatus, I wondered how this would impact their music because one of the greatest draws of RADWIMPS is their tight chemistry, both in the studio and onstage. How would they follow up their previous LP, X to O to Tsumi to (“wrong, right, and sins”), a testament to their growth in arrangement work but a bit clinical in comparison to the resonant warmth of earlier albums? Frontman Yojiro Noda has been quite the busy man this year, penning a single for ballad singer Aimer and releasing a new album for his solo project in later fall. When I heard RADWIMPS was writing the soundtrack for the new Makoto Shinkai film, I was initially concerned that Noda was stretching himself thin creatively. However, “Zen Zen Zense” knocks those worries out cold by meshing the best of both worlds; at the core it is an “old Radwimps” song with lyrics hearkening back to the insightful, grandly romantic gestures of songs like “Futarigoto” (“soliloquy for two“) and “Yuushinron” (“heart theism“) while pushing the newer, more aggressive power-pop sound they started in the Zettai Zetsumei era and honed in X to O to Tsumi to. Hearing the track take off with Akira Kuwahara’s trademark clean, lilting riff felt like coming home. The chorus melody is an insistent earworm and I’m loving how clipped and abrupt everything sounds without being disjointed. To top it off, the bridge inserts a clever “whoa-oh-oh” section to give the song audience singalong potential for future tours. Radwimps have always managed to wrap deep, existential themes in universal, down to earth packages and to toe the line between accessible and artsy without swinging too banal or pretentious, and as both a standalone and tie-in to Kimi no Na wa (“your name”), “Zen Zen Zense” is an all-around masterpiece.
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Edward Okulicz: What starts like a simple trashy pop rock thing, as if a ’90s drama comedy TV theme tune were discovered in the wild, keeps attention with the energetic rhythm even more than the guitar. Bet the whoa-oh section brings down an arena — “See You Again” probably ruined those for everyone, but I’m still into them.
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Juana Giaimo: I consider the bridge a crucial part of a song, and filling it with empty chants that are more appropriate for a football match completely bummed it out. But as for the rest, “Zen Zen Zense” has the energy much Anglo rock music is lacking these days, with vocals that transmit both a passionate urge and warm sentimentality.
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Katherine St Asaph: If “Three Small Words” took way longer to get to the chorus and didn’t quite trust it. That’s still quite a high score to start from.
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Thomas Inskeep: Kinda like Muse without the bombast, on a big dose of amphetamines. That’s not a good thing. 
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Iain Mew: They waste no time getting to the best bit, in the wildly zig-zagging guitar riff, emphasised more by a neat stop-start phasing effect. After that comes competent rock which it’s easy to see working as part of a soundtrack to a movie with record-breaking success but perhaps less so on its own. There is a later, even bigger version of the stop-start waiting as a reward, though.
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Alfred Soto: Radwimps offer none of Gesu no Kiwami Otome and Sakanaction’s formalist tricks, but the stop-start structure has its pleasures.
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