Sgt. Frog's New Opening, ano's 'From Hate To Love!', Sounds Like Punk Rock

ano wrote the opening theme for Keroro Gunsō ☆, the new TV series of Sgt. Frog, the long-running comedy about an alien frog sergeant who keeps failing to conquer Earth from a family home in Tokyo. The series began on 3 October. Four days later, on 7 October, the full song came out on streaming services under its Japanese title, 'Kirai nochi Suki!', and its English one, 'From Hate To Love!'.

ano wrote the words and the music, with TAKU INOUE as co-composer and arranger, and had already written for the franchise's new film. A short version has been on TikTok since 15 September, and a CD single follows on 18 November. On 7 October we found the song on none of the charts we read for Japan: not YouTube's daily, weekly or Shorts charts, not Spotify's daily chart. We found no review of it in English either.

What 'Kirai nochi Suki!' means

Kirai is dislike, suki is like or love, and nochi is the word Japanese weather forecasts use for 'later', as in sunny, later rain. So the title reads like a forecast: hate now, love later. The official English title keeps the direction and loses the weather report. No lyric had been published when we wrote this, so we stop at the title rather than guess at the verses.

How 'From Hate To Love!' sounds

The full version runs 3 minutes 14 seconds. It opens on 23 seconds of drums, which our sound classifier hears as a drum roll and snare, and the voice comes in almost at once and fast. Our speech model times the verse that starts at 0:23 and the chorus that starts at 0:46 at more than three words a second, rap speed. The chorus returns at 2:35. Between them, from 1:49 to 1:59, the song drops to less than half its usual loudness for ten seconds before the last climb.

Then there is what the classifier calls it. In seven of the nine sections our tools find, its top labels include punk rock, heavy metal and 'angry music'. Twice, in the same sections, it also hears 'music for children'. For an opening written for a children's comedy, that is a fair summary: a cute surface over a loud band, with a growl in the middle. Of the 30 comments under the full version on its first day, two point out the shout, two praise the chorus melody, and two are simply glad the full version is out.

Who is listening to 'From Hate To Love!'

Within about 25 hours the full version on ano's official channel had 10,309 views and 566 likes, one like for every 18 views, from a channel of 676,000 subscribers. Five of the 30 comments are in Korean or Spanish, one asking her to come to Mexico. For a song that has been on Japanese TV for four days, that is a small, warm start with an audience already outside Japan.

Our verdict, and our bet on 'From Hate To Love!'

The case for it: an anime opening is heard every week by everyone who watches, it is written to stick in 90 seconds, and the full version gives the TV fans somewhere to go. ano brings her own following, and TAKU INOUE's arrangement gives the cute melody a loud band to push against. The case against: three weeks of TikTok previews have not put it on any chart we read, and Sgt. Frog's first audience, from the 2004 series, is now grown up and may not be watching.

Our bet, and it is only a bet: 'From Hate To Love!' enters Spotify Japan's daily top 200 by 31 October, before the CD is out. We will check it against the same chart and report it either way. More songs we reviewed on the day they came out are on our New Releases page.