theDOGS (Song)

The song made its debut over the ending of the anime film Attack on Titan Part 2: Jiyuu no Tsubasa before opening the theDOGS album on July 1, 2015. It later closed disc one of the "Attack on Titan" Season 2 Original Soundtrack as its sixteenth track on June 7, 2017. The recording runs 4:35.

Benjamin and mpi wrote the lyrics together, with mpi performing the vocal. Hiroyuki Sawano composed and arranged it, as he did the franchise's entire score before The Final Season, and plays piano, keyboards, and all remaining instruments alongside YU "masshoi" Yamauchi on drums, Toshino Tanabe on bass, Hiroshi Iimuro on guitars, and Koichiro Muroya on violin.

Lyrically the song surveys a population bruised and bloodied yet unwilling to abandon its dream, asking whether they were born to lose against Goliath. Verses speak of honing knives, of collapse followed by rebuilding, and of a hundred more years spent in the fire, while the chorus presses the central question: can they really kill them all and conquer this? Later lines turn to dying with honor and dignity, and to burns that heal those who fall into the flames.

Two of its elements travel beyond the song itself. The chorus heard from 1:06 to 1:28 and the ostinato running underneath the entire track both reappear as motifs in 2Volt and in TheWeightOfLives, where the chorus surfaces mid-piece and the ostinato threads through several passages.

Its defining placement is the epilogue and closing credits of Jiyuu no Tsubasa, which the credit sequence populates with the film's cast, from Eren and the Female Titan to Levi's squad and the Smiling Titan. A promotional video produced by Sawano accompanied the release.

The television series saved it for the very end: the song returns in THE FINAL CHAPTERS Special 2 and episode 94 at the moment the Power of the Titans disappears from the world, bookending the franchise with the question the lyrics first posed in 2015.