Massive percussion and ghostly vocal arrangements that sound like nothing else in anime scoring. The AKIRA Original Soundtrack by Geinoh Yamashirogumi is ten tracks of pure controlled chaos. "Keneda" slams in with layered drums and chants while "Battle Against Clown" turns the tension up with frantic rhythmic shifts.
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"Winds Over Neo-Tokyo" gives you this brief, eerie calm before everything spirals again. The back half gets heavy with "Mutation" and "Exodus from the Underground Fortress" pushing into genuinely apocalyptic territory. There's a reason people keep coming back to this decades later.
It predicted sounds that electronic and experimental music wouldn't touch for years. If you want to understand why people call AKIRA's sound design legendary, start here.