Music has always been instrumental in Shinichirō Watanabe’s anime (pun intended). More than just merely background music, every soundtrack featured across Watanabe’s body of work is inextricable from the identity of each of his series, from the big band jazz and rock of Cowboy Bebop to the lo-fi boom bap beats of Samurai Champloo.
Lazarus, the latest sci-fi action thriller anime from Watanabe that premiered earlier this month, is no different, and may in fact be his most conceptually and sonically ambitious work to date. To create the sound for his new series, Watanabe didn’t turn to a composer, but rather to a trio of his favorite musical artists: jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington, EDM producer Floating Points, and downtempo EDM maestro Bonobo. Together, they would collaborate with Watanabe to craft the soundscape for his new universe.
Polygon spoke to Simon Green, aka Bonobo, over the phone last week to talk about his experience working with Watanabe, his approach to scoring Lazarus, and the song that lies at the heart of the series’ core themes and ideas.
[Ed. note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.]
Polygon: Tell me a bit about when you first started working on Lazarus. How did you and Watanabe first meet and start collaborating on the series?
Bonobo: So it was actually a couple of years ago, he reached out to me. I think we were just mutually fans of each other’s work, but he approached me saying that he was making this new show and that he would love me to contribute some music to it. I think this would’ve been early 2023 was when he reached out. Yeah, it was just a conceptual thing. He sent me this PDF with the breakdown of all the characters, who they were, and their backstories in the universe that he was building around the show, sort of geographically and conceptually.
You said on social media that Cowboy Bebop is one of your favorite shows. Tell me more about your history with anime. What are some of your other favorite shows or movies?
I wouldn’t consider myself a big anime head, but I do love what he’s done. I love Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. And I think there’s a lot of the bigger stuff in the ’90s, like Akira obviously is a huge one, and the music in that especially. I have a song called “Otomo” on my album [Fragments], which is named after the director of Akira. I think the use of percussion and all the choral voices and the Japanese percussion in that — the soundtracks, especially in anime, are really inspiring to me and that’s something I’ve always been really excited by. Even Ghost in the Shell. That’s a very iconic soundtrack, especially with the voices and the choirs, and I think that’s been sort of sampled and referenced quite a lot throughout some of electronic music especially.
You’ve spoken in interviews about how you see your albums as representing chapters in your life. Black Sands was your “London” album, The North Borders was your “New York” album, and so on. Where do you see your score for Lazarus within your body of work? What are you most proud of?
I made this record while I was in LA. So, I mean, this was a post-pandemic record. So yeah, I was at home. But really, I think sonically it leans back into a little bit of everything I’ve done. Rather than with a new record where I’m thinking, Where do I go next? Where do I go from the last record? I’ve really lent into everything I’ve done before. So I’ve just taken little bits of, I guess, production knowledge from everything and inspiration and stylistically it was kind of throwing back a little bit further to the Black Sands era maybe. So what I was really doing was kind of trying to honor the show with the music that I was capable of making, which is a little bit of everything from all the records I’ve done before.
I want to talk to you about “Dark Will Fall,” the track that plays at the beginning of the first episode. Doug, one of the members of Lazarus, described it as “something with the vibe of a man who sold his soul to the devil.” Was that how Watanabe described what he wanted out of the song when you were composing it?
Well, yeah, this was the first thing of the conversations that we had. I actually went to meet him in Tokyo and we sat down and talked about the music, and the biggest part of the conversation was about this song before it existed.
It’s like, the show opens with this moment. This is the theme of the show. It’s kind of about these deals with the devil. It’s a classic kind of Delta blues idea. It was — what was the song? I’m going to pull it up. It was about selling yourself to the devil, and he’s like, “This is what I want.” It’s kind about that energy, that sort of song. I’m going to look up this song, actually, because I can’t think about what it is now… Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil,” that was the name of the song he was referencing. So he was like, “This is the energy we want.” It’s a really important scene. And the actual song concludes in the final scene at the end of the show. So it sort of has this full-circle moment; this song, it’s in the first scene and it’s in the last scene. You don’t hear the end of the song until the end of the show.
So yeah, it was very important to him to get this song, and this was the main part of the conversation. It was like, This song is really important. So it was a difficult one to tackle because I’m not a blues musician, so it was like, What do I do? I thought [Jacob Lusk] was the perfect voice for it, and I sat down with Jacob and I told him what me and Watanabe had spoken about, and we kind of wrote this song together and I think it kind of works, right? I mean, it seems to be from that Robert Johnson song; I think this is a kind of more contemporary take on that same idea.
I know you’re always experimenting with different sounds and inspirations pulled from world music. Were there any particular instruments or software you were attracted to while recording the score for Lazarus?
I think because of the conversations I had with Watanabe, he was like, “I don’t want anything to sound too much like a score.” He wanted it to sound like the music I was making, so I wasn’t trying to make anything sound too sort of like a soundtrack or too filmic. But I think there’s a song right at the very end called “Hearts” where I was sort of using a Ugandan harp called a dongo, which I actually picked up from a man called Otim Alpha when I was out doing this writing camp with Gorillaz last year or a couple of years ago. And that is kind of all over it actually. It’s like this kind of bowed harp. It sits on your lap. It’s like a kora, a little bit, but you get it from Uganda. So that was something that was kind of threaded throughout the record.
Lazarus premiered earlier this month. Have you had a chance to watch the series yet, and if so, what’s your impression of it and working with Watanabe?
It was pretty special. I mean, I have friends who do scoring for films and they have a very different experience of it because they’re sort of sitting and writing into picture, whereas this was kind of a lot freer. I think he really wanted me to just make music and then he was going to write the scenes around the music, which is an actual dream. So I think in terms of scoring something, it was such a unique way to do it and a real pleasurable way to do it.
As for the show, I love it. I mean, we’re sort of back in that Cowboy Bebop universe, and it’s just an updated version of that universe, and I think it’s updated in such a way that it addresses a lot of the stuff that we’re all kind of talking about at the moment in 2025, about corporations and moral decisions and where we’re all kind of heading as a society. So I think it’s a really nice way that he’s kind of brought that Cowboy Bebop world into the present time.
Given your experience with Lazarus, would you be open to the possibility of scoring more anime in the future? Have you received any other offers yet?
Not yet, but then I think the thing’s only really been out a week. But yeah, I mean, I’m open to scoring. I’d love to do some more scoring projects for anything, really — I mean, depending if it’s something that I’m into. Anime is a really good place to be. But I’m open to doing broader scoring for anything.
Lazarus (Adult Swim Original Series Soundtrack) is available to stream on YouTube and Spotify. Lazarus is available to stream on Max.
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