AiScReam – Ai Scream!

Taylor takes us to the world of Love Live!… 

[Video]
[7.00]Taylor Alatorre: “Ai Scream!” is about ice cream, which in English sounds like “I scream.” The Japanese word for “ice cream” is “hyouka.” In the 2012 anime series of that name, Hyouka is the title of the yearly anthology published by a high school’s Classic Literature Club. This title, as the show’s mystery-solving cast comes to find out, is a coded bilingual cry of late-1960s despair: “I scream” was the departing message of a Literature Club member who was expelled from the school after being made the scapegoat of a campus-wide protest movement in 1968. His student comrades, feeling guilty for their complicity in his martyrdom, covertly named the anthology’s debut issue in his honor. Despite the scapegoat in question being the presumed-dead uncle of the deuteragonist, this revelation goes unmentioned for the rest of the series, which only deepens the symbolism: the slice-of-life hijinks of the present are built upon the muffled screams of the past. “Ai Scream!” has nothing even obliquely to say about the Zenkyōtō movement or faded political alternatives; the deliciousness of cookies & cream is the ultimate “80/20 issue.” However, for a Love Live! song to go viral in the West, to a greater degree than even “Snow Halation,” is a phenomenon deserving of some unpacking. But maybe not too much unpacking, because on your first listen you can clock exactly which segment is the one that made the TikTok rounds — say, might it be the part that explicitly invites user participation? The question being asked of the singers and listener together — “Which [flavor] do you like?” — is a refinement of the English-language demands made in the first verse: “Tell me more… Let me hear more.” Is this not a saccharine echo of the fiat lux of all social media, the question whose omnipresence makes it invisible: “What’s on your mind, Taylor?” “What’s happening?” Do we even register in our minds this question when we post, or do we do it because for the past 15 years it’s just what one does? Do we imagine that, absent some pre-existing power at our disposal, our answer to this question will cause any lasting changes to the world outside that text box? Do we, while listening to “Ai Scream!”, conversely believe that there is a person named Ruby Kurosawa; that her favorite ice cream flavor is chocomint; and that she cares what our favorite flavor is, too? (Just say yes.) The world modeled by AiScReam is one that fulfills the broken promises of democratic community, where each individual’s preferences are not only asserted but affirmatively recognized, by a larger group which is genuinely strengthened by its wealth of small differences. Such differences are outshone by the white-hot certitude that is the group’s inviolable North Star belief: “Of course, we all love AiScReam!”
[10]

Al Varela: I had way too much fun with this. Absolutely bursting with charm and hooks. Now I want ice cream in 40 degree weather.
[8]

Jel Bugle: I knew this one already (though initially thought someone had picked “Naughty AI” by Pyra ft. Haru Nemuri). I generally like idol pop, and every J/K-pop group has been doing skits of this, so it’s one of the most important songs of 2025!
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Hayato Yamamoto, co-producer of this song, was also the composer of an ending theme to a sweet little kid anime miniseries called Yonin wa Sorezore Uso o Tsuku. The song is, of course, quick and short, but it is also a loping indie pop/symphonic theme that is a lush sugar rush. It’s over just as you have gotten into it, but the lovely harmonies of the main characters sung by Megumi Han, Natsumi Murakami, Ayane Sakura and Chiemi Tanaka sweep you up in the joy, and you play it over and over again, trying to find the words for its beauty and fumbling as the bright lively string arrangement spins around you. As for the song itself, I get all of the lush sugar rush yet none of the joy. That is clearly DJ Chika’s fault.
[5]

Ian Mathers: Certainly plenty of pop over the years has had an edifice of one sort of another constructed around the actual songs; that alone is pretty value neutral. But tonight the extra-musical effort around this particular single is just hitting me harder than normal; the elaborate matching outfits and intense choreo, the fictional and metafictional levels to it, how fatigued I feel after even glancing at the wiki page for Love Live! The song itself is pretty catchy, it just feels slightly obscured by… all that.
[7]

Iain Mew: It’s been more than a decade since Perfume’s “Laser Beam” and I still love just about every song that does the cut-up fast-forward middle eight. Even one where it is as comparatively low key as here, used as a final touch of sprinkles on top of the sweet call-and-response concoction.
[7]

Claire Davidson: Strip away all the media franchise tie-ins that birthed both “Ai Scream!” and its attendant supergroup, and you have the makings of a really promising J-pop track, all whirring, kinetic synth patters that fizzle with a lightness reminiscent of some galactically-tinged Anglophone pop cuts from the early 2010s. The song has a strong hook and an even stronger post-chorus, where the three vocalists behind AiScReam harmonize with such earnest wistfulness that it’s hard not to get swept up in the track’s sheer commitment to its dizzying pop energy. “Ai Scream!” becomes considerably more difficult to like, though, once it begins to pile on its juvenile schoolgirl schtick, overloading the track with baby-voiced ad-libs and a second verse whose sketch-like structure becomes particularly exasperating. I know that schoolgirl gimmickry is inherent to the Love Live! franchise that birthed this group, but without that additional context, the song becomes grating in record time—all the more disappointing, given the potential it had to genuinely soar.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Amnesty Week is always a vital tool for my music discovery for the year. In this case, I finally know where the audio from that one Lebron/Steph fancam came from. Thank god.
[5]