The Best Anime Soundtracks, Ranked by How Much They Carried the Show
Some scores are wallpaper. These are the ones doing as much storytelling as the animation — ranked by how much weaker the show would be without them.
AnimeShinsekai Team · Oct 18, 2026 · 6 min read
A great anime soundtrack doesn't just underscore a scene, it does part of the storytelling job the visuals and dialogue can't — setting a show's entire emotional register before a single line is spoken. These are the scores that earn a spot on their own, independent of the show they were written for.
#1: Yoko Kanno — Cowboy Bebop. The soundtrack that taught a generation of anime composers what genre-blending could sound like, jumping from hard bebop jazz to blues to orchestral balladry scene to scene without ever feeling like a gimmick. 'Tank!' is the obvious hall-of-fame pick, but it's the quieter cues — the stuff playing under Spike's loneliest moments — that actually make the show work.
#2: Hiroyuki Sawano — Attack on Titan. Sawano's wall-of-sound choral-orchestral style has been imitated across half of modern shounen, and for good reason — tracks built around Latin and German vocal hooks turned the Scout Regiment's charges into something closer to religious spectacle than ordinary action-scene scoring. It's maximalist in a way that could easily tip into self-parody, and almost never does.
#3: Yuki Kajiura — Sword Art Online and Fate/Zero. Kajiura's signature choral-electronic hybrid sound has become shorthand for 'high-stakes fantasy anime' at this point, largely because she's the one who built the template — ethereal, layered vocal work over driving electronic percussion that makes even mid-tier fight scenes feel consequential.
#4: Joe Hisaishi — the Studio Ghibli catalog. Technically film scoring rather than a single series, but no list of essential anime composers is complete without him — the Totoro theme alone has done more to define what 'anime music' sounds like to people who've never watched anime than almost anything else on this list. His work with Hayao Miyazaki across Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and Howl's Moving Castle treats melody as the primary storytelling tool, not an accent.
#5: Kohei Tanaka — One Piece. The most unsung entry here, mostly because the sheer length of One Piece means Tanaka's work has had over two decades to become wallpaper for longtime viewers. It shouldn't be — the man has scored well over a thousand episodes without the orchestral themes ever going stale, and the big emotional cues, the kind that hit during a flag-raising or a funeral, are doing heavy lifting that the animation budget of any given week sometimes can't.