Source: Artist

Featuring appearances from Thundercat, Niki Randa, and Denzel Curry.

As promised, Flying Lotus has released his full score for the new Netflix anime series, Yasuke.

The producer announced the project in a tweet on Thursday morning, sharing the cover art and pre-order links for the album (see below.) Helmed entirely by the Brainfeeder chief, the soundtrack features his compositions for the series, including the already released theme song “Black Gold,” which featured an appearance from Thundercat. The 26-track score also features contributions from Niki Randa and Denzel Curry. “You haven’t really heard an anime score do a “Blade Runner” thing, the producer notes of his inspiration for the music of Yasuke. “I was like, ‘let me try and get into the headspace of that’ but also there were several things that were part of the recipe for me. I thought about when Dilla would sample [Isao] Tomita and people like Vangelis, and how he had a [signature] sound when he did that sort of thing,” FlyLo adds. 

Happy Yasuke day
This is also coming.
Midnight tonight
My new album/ost “YASUKE”https://t.co/0kF88G4jKn pic.twitter.com/M0qUVds1m4

— YASUKE (@flyinglotus) April 29, 2021

The producer was intimately involved with the show’s creation. And at all levels. Flying Lotus served as Yasuke‘s music director and executive producer and even shopped the show to studios. Based on a real-life Black samurai, the surrealist six-episode series centers on the sword-wielding title character (voiced by Atlanta‘s Lakeith Stanfield,) navigating a magic-and-mech-heavy version of feudal Japan.

Yasuke technically marks the producer’s second run with anime music direction. In 2017, Flying Lotus provided the score to the animated short, Bladerunner 2022, a criminally brief but hard-hitting sequel to Ridley Scott’s dystopian 1982 classic starring Harrison Ford.

Watch Yasuke on Netflix today and hear the score from Flying Lotus below.

Story updated on April 30th, 2021.