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Every so often, a song shows up where the interesting question isn’t how high it debuts but how long it refuses to sink. Hitsujibungaku’s “Keep Walking” is one of those. This isn’t a song that shoves you forward with big words — it’s a song that sits down next to the person who can’t walk anymore, which is exactly why it travels so far.
It was written on assignment for the side story of TBS’s Sunday drama VIVANT, which is a genuinely unusual place for a theme song to land. Here’s a read on the track, the tie-in, and where it sits inside the band’s current chapter.
Key facts
- “Keep Walking” was released digitally on July 29, 2026.
- It’s the theme for Drum — VIVANT THE ORIGIN STORY, the spinoff to TBS’s Sunday drama VIVANT, streaming exclusively on U-NEXT.
- Written and composed by Moeka Shiotsuka; arrangement credited to Hitsujibungaku as a band.
- A mid-tempo rock number, and one of the first significant songs the band has released as a duo — Moeka Shiotsuka (vocals/guitar) and Yurika Kasai (bass) — since drummer Hiroa Fukuda left at the end of 2025.
- A theme song for the sidekick’s story
- The first sound a two-piece Hitsujibungaku chose to make
- Sound: what stays when the noise is pulled out
- The theme: sitting next to someone who’s still powerless
- How it’s actually being listened to
- Where it sits in the band’s arc
- Chart movement (TOKIO HOT 100 watch)
- Where to start next
- Related reading
A theme song for the sidekick’s story
Start with the tie-in, because the tie-in tells you something. Hitsujibungaku dropped “Keep Walking” on July 29 as the theme for Drum — VIVANT THE ORIGIN STORY, the spinoff to TBS’s Sunday drama VIVANT. Not the main show. The spinoff. And not on broadcast, either — it’s a streaming-exclusive on U-NEXT. For a network-drama tie-in in Japan, that’s an odd place to plant your theme song.
The show itself is an all-original story built around Drum, the ally who spent the main series standing next to Mamoru Nozaki — the Public Security Bureau officer played by Hiroshi Abe — while the two of them got through one crisis after another. Where the original left Drum mostly mysterious, the spinoff goes back and draws his beginning.
Here’s what makes it interesting. The protagonist isn’t the hero — it’s the guy who stayed at the hero’s shoulder. Hitsujibungaku got the call to score the version of Drum who was powerless, who nobody had heard of yet. “Keep Walking” is a mid-tempo rock number that pairs lyrics about finding the courage to take one step forward with a light, unhurried guitar tone, and it was surprise-dropped inside Episode 4 of the U-NEXT run, which set social media off. As a way to light a fuse before Season 2 of the main series kicks in, it’s a smart placement.
The production side has been open about how the offer happened, too. Their explanation, half-joking, leaned on the ridiculous logic of “VIVANT means sheep, sheep means Hitsujibungaku” — using it as cover so they didn’t have to just admit outright that they’re huge fans of the band. Cute story, but it also mirrors how the band’s music actually reaches people: not a straight shout, more like warmth handed to you from a slight angle.
The first sound a two-piece Hitsujibungaku chose to make
You can’t really talk about this track without the band context. Hitsujibungaku started in 2011, when Moeka Shiotsuka was in her third year of junior high. From 2017 they were a three-piece with Shiotsuka, Yurika Kasai and Hiroa Fukuda, they major-labeled in 2020, and at the end of 2025 Fukuda left — leaving them as a duo. Roughly eight years of that three-piece configuration, gone. “Keep Walking” is effectively an early work of whatever comes next.
Being the first thing a downsized band releases is heavier than it sounds. When the lineup changes, the center of gravity of the sound moves whether you want it to or not. Taking that on inside a written-to-order tie-in is a certain kind of nerve. And what actually comes out of the speakers isn’t the shoegaze wall of the three-piece years or the drifting, dreamy air of the Moshi Moshi, Watashi era. It sits lower. The BPM doesn’t sprint, the guitars don’t max out the fuzz, and you can hear the outline of the bass. Words and music by Shiotsuka, arrangement credited to Hitsujibungaku — and that arrangement credit, in this context, reads like a small declaration.
The thing my ear kept catching, honestly, was the drum part. No showy fills pulling to the front. It’s the kind of drumming that just steadily marks the pulse in the middle of the tempo, tuned to what feels almost exactly like a walking pace. Which is ironic, given the timing — the first song after the drummer’s departure, and the drum track is this loyal to the rhythm of a step.
Sound: what stays when the noise is pulled out
The band’s calling card has always been Shiotsuka’s translucent vocal sitting on top of noisy guitars. That’s not the trick here. The distortion isn’t the lead role. The intro guitar is surprisingly clean-leaning, and the reverb isn’t deep. Instead of making the room feel huge, it feels like something being played in a room.
Through the verses, the chord movement is almost flat — the drama comes from the bass, which walks and twitches underneath. Shiotsuka enters closer to a whisper than a shout, and it’s only in the chorus that the voice cracks open, and only halfway. That deliberate choice not to blow the chorus up doesn’t really sit in the shoegaze lineage. It’s closer to the mid-tempo tracks on late-’90s / early-’00s US indie rock records — the Phoebe Bridgers or Big Thief mode of quietly walking a song forward instead of exploding it.
Because it doesn’t grandstand, it doesn’t step on dialogue or ambient sound when it plays under a scene. Drama theme songs that try too hard kill the breathing room of the show they’re attached to. The restraint here is professionally smart.
One more production note. The mix places the vocal fairly dry and close — you feel her singing near your ear, not up on a stage. The guitars and cymbals are set back slightly, so the voice sits alone in front. That’s not arena-rock thinking. That’s a mix built for earbuds, built for the way drama themes are actually consumed in the 2020s — through a phone, on a train, streaming.
About Shiotsuka’s voice specifically: she can push it up into the clear high register when she wants to, but here she seems to intentionally keep more of the chest resonance in the tone. The vocal isn’t reaching for the ceiling. It’s being set down on the ground. The concept of the song and the design of the voice shake hands cleanly.
The theme: sitting next to someone who’s still powerless
The production side has hinted at where the song came from emotionally — roughly, a world that, looked at coldly, is lonely and cruel, and a person struggling through that world alone, still powerless. “Sitting with the person who’s still powerless” isn’t new territory for this band. It runs through Shiotsuka’s writing.
Her lyrics have always put the weaker version of the self at the center of the song without disowning it. Not an order to live strong — a quiet suggestion that even in the weak version, one step is still possible. That’s why it’s hard to just call these songs anthems. “Anthem” implies someone at the front leading you. This is running next to you. Even “Keep Walking” as a title, which taken literally is a command, is sung without any of the pressure of a command. That’s the whole point.
Which is exactly why it fits the spinoff. The main show is the hero’s story. The spinoff is the story of the person standing beside the hero. Not big words — the words of someone sitting next to you. Song and drama looking at the world from the same angle. Once a tie-in fits that snugly, it stops being coincidence and starts being good music supervision.
Three things to listen for
- The restrained chorus. It doesn’t fully open. The voice only cracks halfway. That withheld catharsis grows on you with repeats.
- Drums as footsteps. No showy fills. A steady pulse that carries the whole song. Once you notice it, you can’t unhear it.
- Cleaner-than-expected guitars. If you only know the wall-of-noise Hitsujibungaku, this tone might feel disarming at first. It works better at dusk than at night.
How it’s actually being listened to
The interesting question is when this song works. As a drama theme it sits fine in an evening scene, but on its own I keep noticing it lands harder on a weekday morning, on the platform, before the train comes. It’s not built to push you forward. It’s built to stand next to the version of you who hasn’t managed to step forward yet, for those few minutes before you get on.
More concretely: try it in the car. It won’t make you press the gas. Your driving actually gets a little more careful. The tempo and the vocal restraint don’t rev the body up the way a hip-hop banger or a sprint-tempo rock song would. Opposite direction, basically.
Read one way, it’s a song for the days you can’t walk. Read the other way, some listeners have said it’s the thing that got them out the door. Both readings hold. Not putting the pressure of a command onto a command-form title is what gives the song that width.
My personal listening slot for it, oddly, is Friday night, right after getting home. The week’s over, and you’re not triumphant, you’re not defeated, you’re just tired. Pump-up rock is too loud for that. Ambient is too empty. There’s a narrow band in between, and this song sits in it neatly. Nobody pulling you by the hand — someone sitting down next to you.
Where it sits in the band’s arc
Line up their previous tie-ins and this one looks distinct. In September 2023 they landed the ending theme for the anime Jujutsu Kaisen, and they’ve played main slots at Fuji Rock Festival, one of the biggest music festivals in Japan. more than words pulled the anime audience in, Fuji Rock pulled the live-music crowd in, and now this one is landing on a totally different layer — live-action drama, streaming-exclusive spinoff.
The earlier tie-ins mostly worked because the band’s noise or drift matched the otherworldly feel of the show. This one is different. It cuts on the restraint side. Writing a song that still works with the three-piece-era weapons deliberately holstered — that’s the two-piece band planting a flag.
Put another way, this isn’t a song trying to hide that the lineup shrank. It’s a song built on top of admitting it. You could paper over the gap with big drum fills and pretend the three-piece is still in the room. They chose not to. That’s a quiet choice, but it takes some nerve.
Zoom out one more level. Among the bands that came out of the Japanese indie-rock scene in the late 2010s, Hitsujibungaku is one of very few who’ve held onto an alt-rock texture this long. A lot of their peers drifted toward city-pop or a more straightforward J-pop lane; this band never let go of the noise and the unstable tonalities. Even with the fuzz pulled back on “Keep Walking,” the skeleton is still alt-rock. If anything, cutting the noise makes the skeleton more visible.
Chart movement (TOKIO HOT 100 watch)
Chart-wise, this is a track that builds streams gradually as the drama’s episodes roll out, rather than a spike-and-fade record. The surprise drop inside Episode 4, the official release on July 29, and the start of Season 2 of the main VIVANT run stack in three neat layers. Distance runner, not sprinter.
The number to watch isn’t the peak position, it’s which week it’s still in the chart. Songs tied to a show tend to get a fresh nudge every time an episode airs, and this band’s catalog already has long-tail listening baked in. Add ongoing drama chatter on top of that and the number should be sticky.
Where to start next
If “Keep Walking” is your first Hitsujibungaku song, the easiest next step is more than words, the Jujutsu Kaisen ending — that’s the noisier side of the band in a single dose. After that, listen to an album straight through, because that’s where they really live. Once you’ve done both, you’ll hear that this quiet “Keep Walking” is just one drawer in a much bigger cabinet. For up-to-date album info, their official site is the source of truth.
“Keep Walking” is literally an instruction. But the way the song sounds, that instruction never actually gets barked. If “just keep walking” were enough for the listener to get up and walk, the song wouldn’t need to exist. This is a song that stays close to the person who can’t, and marks the pulse for them. A two-piece Hitsujibungaku scoring the sidekick’s origin, at a mid-tempo, refusing to sound like the command their title actually is — none of that feels accidental. Does the two-piece version keep protecting that lingering aftereffect the band has always had? On this song, yes. The open question is what the next one sounds like.
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