Who Composed The Xlecx Soundtrack For Season Two?

Nao Ishikawa wrote the season-two music for 'xlecx', and I’ve been playing those tracks on repeat. Her approach is subtle: she plants tiny melodic fragments in early episodes that blossom into full arrangements by the finale, so the score feels like a narrative thread rather than a series of isolated pieces. She favors a mix of warm strings and vintage synths, with occasional acoustic solo instruments to humanize the electronic sound palette. I appreciate how she uses silence as much as sound, letting tension breathe before hitting a cinematic swell.

The OST includes some really memorable cues — atmospheric pieces that set a scene without screaming for attention, plus a few more aggressive, rhythm-driven tracks for action sequences. There’s a clear through-line in her themes, which makes listening to the album sequentially very satisfying. Personally, I find myself reaching for her quieter tracks when I want to concentrate, and the bigger motifs when I need something more cinematic while I read or draw. It’s thoughtful scoring that sticks with you, and I like how it deepens the whole series for me.

I still get chills thinking about the first cue that plays over the opening of season two, and yeah — that haunting mix of synth and strings is the work of Nao Ishikawa. She composed the soundtrack for 'xlecx' season two, and her fingerprints are all over the show: delicate piano motifs one moment, pulsing electronic textures the next. Nao's background in contemporary composition shows in how she structures themes across episodes, letting melodies mutate rather than repeat, so the score feels like a living thing woven into the storytelling.

What I love most is how she balances old and new. There are orchestral swells that give scenes emotional weight, but she layers them with analog synth patches and field recordings — city rain, distant sirens, metallic echoes — to root the soundscape in the show's neon-tinged world. Standout tracks for me are 'Neon Tide' and 'Afterimage' (both recurrent leitmotifs), and she invited a couple of guest musicians for texture: a shakuhachi on the quieter pieces and a live string quartet for the climactic episodes. The OST release came out shortly after the finale on both streaming platforms and a limited-edition vinyl; that pressing has a gorgeous etching and a different mix for opening and ending cues.

Listening to the soundtrack on its own is a trip because Nao composes with the visuals in mind but never lets the music be merely background. It tells its own stories, and I keep finding new details every time I replay it — that subtle hi-hat pattern in episode five that only comes forward during the third act, or the harmonics on the cello that suggest an unresolved memory. Honestly, it’s one of those scores that hooked me harder than the plot sometimes, and I still put it on when I want a moody, cinematic vibe.

The composer credited for season two of 'xlecx' is Nao Ishikawa, and her work there is the kind of scoring that sinks into your head long after the credits roll. She leans into hybrid scoring — orchestral foundations augmented with modular synth textures and processed acoustic sounds — so the results feel cinematic but also intimately modern. Tracks like 'Falling Circuits' and 'Resonant City' recur as motifs that evolve with the characters, which is a neat compositional trick: small melodic cells are stretched, inverted, or reharmonized across episodes.

From a production perspective, I noticed she mixed a lot of organic imperfections into the electronic layers: tape saturation, slight detuning, room mics left in for ambience. That gives the soundtrack an analog warmth that prevents it from sounding overly polished or sterile. There were also a few collaborations — a guest vocalist on the penultimate episode and a percussionist who added unusual rhythmic color — which helped certain scenes land emotionally. If you enjoy scores that reward active listening, the season two OST is worth studying for how theme development and sound design can complement long-form storytelling; I still pull cues from it when I’m sketching moods for my own projects, and it stays a favorite for late-night soundtrack sessions.