Beyblade X Opening 'Fearless' by &TEAM, Measured Against 'Prove' and 'Rise'

The new Beyblade X opening is 'Fearless' by &TEAM, following openings by ONE OK ROCK, L'Arc-en-Ciel, TOMORROW X TOGETHER and i-dle. Since April new episodes have premiered on the Beyblade YouTube channel, with TV Tokyo airing them later until 25 September. Its new arc, Bey Kingdom, announced for streaming only, started on Friday 9 October at 7 pm Japan time. The full song went on sale five hours later, at midnight on 10 October.

&TEAM are HYBE's group from Japan, nine members picked through a televised audition in 2022, much as KATSEYE were later picked through an audition series in the United States. The credits on the official audio name all nine as singers: EJ, FUMA, K, NICHOLAS, YUMA, JO, HARUA, TAKI and MAKI. Five people wrote and produced it: Soma Genda, SAS, LOAR, Seann Bowe and Sho, whom the anime's channel credits as being from the rock band MY FIRST STORY. Julian Gargiulo mixed it and Ted Jensen mastered it. The anime's announcement on 17 September called it grand and heavy, with a new way of singing for the group.

'Fearless', second by second

Measured on the official audio, 'Fearless' has a voice by 0.9 seconds, and at 0:18 the track turns heavy: a loud passage that returns at 0:55 and 1:57, each time tagged by our sound classifier as grunge, punk or metal, which is distorted-guitar territory. Between the second and third returns, at 1:28, the beat switches for 17 seconds into something the classifier calls dubstep and hip-hop, and the words pick up to almost three a second. The last 15 seconds fall back to piano and an echoing voice, the quietest part of the song. The full version runs 2:53. The TV version on the Beyblade channel lasts about a minute and a half, and we measured it against two earlier openings there: the classifier first hears grunge or metal 12 seconds into TOMORROW X TOGETHER's 'Rise', 19 seconds into 'Fearless' and 46 seconds into ONE OK ROCK's 'Prove'. The TV version of i-dle's 'Invincible' was not available to us. Our classifier also heard punk rock and heavy metal in the other new anime opening we reviewed this month, ano's 'From Hate To Love!' for Sgt. Frog.

'Fearless' and the four Beyblade X openings before it

Counted at 16:44 UTC on 10 October: the TV version had 115,080 views on the Beyblade channel, the official audio 59,972, and an anime music video posted on the same channel on 10 October 52,459. There the earlier openings stand at 3,132,521 for ONE OK ROCK's 'Prove' after three years, 2,496,337 for TOMORROW X TOGETHER's 'Rise' after a year and a half, 607,665 for L'Arc-en-Ciel's 'YOU GOTTA RUN' after two years and 607,860 for i-dle's 'Invincible' after about a year.

&TEAM bring a proven audience in Japan: a Billboard Japan Hot 100 No. 1 with 'Aoarashi' in 2024 and a single certified for a million copies, 'Go in Blind', in 2025. They have sung for anime before, the opening of 'Trillion Game' and both theme songs of 'Honey Lemon Soda'. On YouTube's weekly songs chart for Japan that ended on 1 October, their 'Good Boy' was No. 78.

What 'Fearless' needs by 9 November

The anime will play it every Friday for months, the fans showed up on the first night, and the heavy part lands early enough to work in a 90-second edit. But the show has moved from broadcast television to YouTube, and a rock song sung in Japanese has to win over two audiences at once, an idol group's fans and the anime's young viewers.

By 9 November, when Bey Kingdom is a month old, we expect the TV version of 'Fearless' to have more views on the Beyblade channel than two of the openings before it, 'YOU GOTTA RUN' and 'Invincible': over 607,860.