One Piece (2023 soundtrack)

One Piece (Soundtrack from the Netflix Series) is the soundtrack accompanying the Netflix television series One Piece, a live action adaptation of the manga series of the same name. The soundtrack featured 79 tracks from the score composed by Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli, consisted of a four-hour long runtime underscoring the eight-episode series. It also featured two songs: "My Sails Are Set" and "Bang!", performed respectively by Aurora and Flawless Real Talk. The former, along with the instrumental track "Wealth Fame Power", led the soundtrack as a single release, while the album in entirety was released by Netflix Music on September 1, 2023. The soundtrack featured a diverse range of genres, from rap, hip-hop to orchestral music.
Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli were hired to compose the score for the series. After providing music for the first season of the Netflix series The Witcher, the duo wanted the next project to have a musical world building, and when they first heard about the live-action adaptation of the manga series One Piece, they immediately agreed to be onboard for the project. Composition began in late-November and December 2021, where they shot a three-and-half minute video analyzing the pitch and the outline of the concept and the basic sketches of the series' music, where each character had their own distinct instrumentation.
Belousova and Ostinelli recorded the score with 110 musicians at the Abbey Road Studios which included 23 orchestral sessions held for 82 hours and over 3,667 takes. The initial music consisted of 180 cues running for seven hours, and the final existing length consisted of 79 themes running for four hours.
The first track from the album "Wealth Fame Power" connects Luffy with Gold Roger's legacy. The song has "ascending motion" as Luffy is at the start of his journey so in Roger's scene, they reversed the theme to be in "descending motion" as Rogers is "about to be executed" – "we are ending one storyline, but we are immediately beginning another storyline". She used a hurdy-gurdy for the theme, an instrument which they experimented on The Witcher and virtuoso flamenco guitar played by guitarist Marcin Patrzalek. Additionally, the themes of the other members of the Straw Hat Pirates were blended into Luffy's theme since Luffy serves as the crew's captain.
For Zoro's character, the duo decided on using each instrument representing the sword, with one sword being represented by the bansuri and the other being represented with the beat-box type music that determines the "bursts of breath" and the 42-inch frame drum was used, highlighting as the perfect instrument for Zoro, while the Wado Ichimonji sword which Zoro had a historic connection, is represented by duduk as it had a "mystical and sacred color to it". Sanji's character was represented with a jazzy music, which insisted for a big-band jazz ensemble performing the jazz theme. Usopp's theme was represented with an ukulele in the initial season, establishing his character from the first episode and then grows in sound with the 12-string guitar performing Usopp's theme. Nami's theme features a flute and initially plays "in a very kind of fun, determined, quirky manner" but as the character is explored more in depth over the season, the theme reappears in "different shades". The album's second single "My Sails Are Set", featuring Norwegian singer Aurora, is a lyrical song rendition of Nami's theme; this iteration externalizes Nami's journey and acts as the culmination of the series' musical ideas. On the development of this song, Belousova commented that "usually songs function as needle drops – it's very rare for songs to have actually any sort of musical connection to the rest of the score".
Mixtape from Baratie is the second soundtrack to the series, that featured musical themes and instrumentals heard at the pirate restaurant Baratie. Performed by the One Piece Big Band ensemble along with jazz soloists, it was released on September 8, 2023.
Matt Patches of Polygon highlighted that showrunners Matt Owens and Steven Maeda did not give Belousova and Ostinelli "picture-locked episodes" to add underscore to but instead tasked them "with composing a world's worth of sounds that could be in constant conversation depending on which eccentric characters or pirate-y locations were in play at any given moment". Collider's Arezou Amin stated that show's music "strikes a kind of nostalgic, adventuring tone" with the nostalgia due to "how jaunty it is". Kirsten Carey, for The Mary Sue, viewed the score as "fun" but also "highly repetitive". Carey criticized it for playing "over 90% of a given episode" and suggested one could "make a drinking game out of how many times the main theme plays per episode outside of the title".
Matt Owen, for Guitar World, opined that Mihawk's theme was a "quintessential" performance by Marcin Patrzalek as it is "smothered with the classical and flamenco motifs that nod to his early roots, all while upping the ante with behind-the-nut strums, off-the-cuff tuning peg divebombs and (of course) a healthy dose of body knocks for additional percussive flair".