You Say Run gains an English vocal for MHA's tenth year

Toho has given My Hero Academia's most recognisable piece of music a new voice. You Say Run -10th Anniversary ver.- keeps Yuki Hayashi's original arrangement and adds English vocals from Kevin Ratajczak and Nico Sallach of the German electronicore band Electric Callboy. The anime's official site dated the release to the music platforms from midnight on Tuesday 22 September, and the news was broken on stage at the London date of the My Hero Academia concert tour on Sunday 20 September.

Ten years of the theme that carries the fights

Hayashi wrote You Say Run for the television anime, which began in April 2016, and the track has been the soundtrack to Midoriya's turning points ever since, running through eight television seasons and four films. The anniversary version came out of an idea Hayashi had been carrying for years: what the theme would sound like if someone put words to it. For a song written for a worldwide audience, the anime's music team wanted a singer who could deliver both a shout and a melody, and settled on Electric Callboy. The band said joining the project was an honour, and Hayashi said the result has been reborn with an energy the original never had, adding that the new cover art is as good as the recording.

What lands on 22 September

The release is part of My Hero Academia The Animation 10th Anniversary, the year-long project marking the decade since the first season. Bones Film, the studio behind the anime, drew a new distribution cover for it: Midoriya mid-SMASH, a deliberate nod to the cover of the season one soundtrack. Pre-save and distribution links are collected on the anime's own link page, and the track appears on the usual music platforms from midnight Japan time on 22 September.

Where the announcement was made

The reveal came during the anime's live concert tour, which is travelling through several countries with the score performed by an orchestra. The tour's London performance on 20 September is where Ratajczak and Sallach's contribution was first played to an audience, which is a fitting stage for a theme built around big moments rather than quiet ones.

Our opinion

Anime themes get anniversary re-releases constantly and most of them are packaging exercises, so the interesting thing here is the choice of guest rather than the occasion. Electric Callboy are a band whose entire appeal is committed silliness delivered at volume, and You Say Run is one of the few anime tracks that can absorb that without turning into a joke: it is already a song that behaves like a chorus, so handing it two shouters and a metal chorus is a shorter jump than it sounds. Whether the English lyric survives repeated listening is the open question, and the answer will not come from a live premiere where the room is already screaming.