Name: Dark Machine: The Animation
Director: Kazumi Terada

Sugizo has spent more than three decades treating the rock band as a sound laboratory, from Luna Sea’s visual-kei heyday to his place in X Japan and the jazz-rock improvisations of his own group, Shag. What the guitarist had never done is score an animated series. Dark Machine: The Animation, the Fuji TV anime about a near-future Japan in thrall to a single competitive game, is where he finally does it, and the soundtrack built around that debut is now heading to CD, vinyl and streaming.

The series is one half of Dark Machine, a project designed to live in both esports and anime. Its protagonist, Kairi, wants to become the top player of Dark Machine, an e-sport with overwhelming global popularity in the show’s world. Kazumi Terada directs at Production +h, with Gorō Taniguchi as creative producer and Kenshō Ono voicing Kairi. The press release promises a “dark and rich soundscape”, a fair description of what a guitarist of Sugizo’s temperament would bring to a story about machines and the people who pilot them.

Image: © Project Carbuncle / DARK MACHINE Committee

He did not build it alone. The album gathers collaborators from across his career: MaZDA, a core member of his live band Cosmic Dance Quintet; the track maker Ubar-Tumar; the Vocaloid producer ATLOS; Sena, guitarist of the visual-kei band Jiluka; Shinobu of Creature Creature, the band led by Morrie; komaki on drums and percussion; and members of Shag on keyboards, percussion, drums and trumpet. It reads less like a session roster than a map of the scenes Sugizo moves between.

The score shares the album with the show’s songs. It carries TV-size versions of the opening theme, “Sonzai Riyu Kai” by BUCK-TICK, and the ending theme, “Galaxy Mode” by Sandaime J Soul Brothers. It also includes “Pitch Black”, an insert song by Stellatus, the idol group that serves as Dark Machine’s brand ambassadors inside the fiction. Taku Inoue composed the fast, danceable track, sung by the characters Aluk, Spica and Denebola, who are voiced by Nao Toyama, Rei Nakashima and Nonoka Obuchi.

Dark Machine: The Animation Original Soundtrack artwork by Hidetaka Tenjin with the Sugizo credit and release editions — Image: © Project Carbuncle / DARK MACHINE Committee

The physical release comes in two shapes. The 2-CD set runs to 40 tracks, gathering the score, the theme songs and the insert song. The 2-LP edition is a selection curated personally by Sugizo, a distilled cut of the show’s world rather than its complete archive. The cover is an original illustration by Hidetaka Tenjin, the series’ mecha designer, whose work spans the Macross and Gundam franchises.

Dark Machine: The Animation Original Soundtrack is released on December 9, 2026, on CD and LP, and on the same day across streaming and download services including Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music Unlimited, YouTube Music and the iTunes Store. “Pitch Black” arrives first, on streaming platforms from November 11 at midnight Japan time. A commemorative Talk & Sign event is planned for release day.

For a musician whose bands have long traded in spectacle, the more interesting question is what Sugizo does when the picture comes first. An esports drama about a game that has become its world’s obsession is an unusually fitting first brief.

Tags: anime soundtracks, BUCK-TICK, Dark Machine: The Animation, Hidetaka Tenjin, Luna Sea, Sugizo