Yesterday, my favourite band, Japanese-founded, currently Los Angeles-based, emo/pop-punk quartet ONE OK ROCK, released a new single, and with it, a Greatest Hits album (Apple Music streaming link linked, because that’s what I use).

I’ll have to actually listen to it to truly decide, but I don’t think it’s very good at first glance. I’ve been curating my own playlist for them for a few years now. At first, it was kept under 80 minutes so I could burn it to CD. Now, neither of my computers have an optical drive, so I dropped that requirement. (I now have an external burner, but I don’t have any blanks.) I have the playlist saved on Apple Music, and I have assembled the songs from their albums and I have it as an actual album on my Plex media server.

Just to get ahead of what I feel like somebody is going to ask, no, I haven’t used AI to make this playlist. I started it years ago, before we had all these chat bots, and I’ve just slotted new songs in where I felt they fit, and took other songs out as I got tired of hearing them. But something someone said in that thread did inspire me to eventually make this post. They said it would be more interesting if I did it myself. So, here we are. One I did myself. So I’m curious if the reaction was more about AI or more about music. I suppose we’ll see. Because I believe anything using any AI at all should be disclosed. And it’s fair if people don’t like that. I just believe in honesty and transparency around that or other issues that trigger people or inspire people to emotional response in some way.

So, that said, where the band and/or their producer and I agree in crafting a ONE OK ROCK greatest hits album, is to focus on the new stuff. The official album focuses exclusively on songs in English, not touching any of the albums that mixed Japanese lyrics in. There are basically three generations of the band’s music. The mostly-Japanese post-hardcore stuff. The Japanese/English hard rock stuff. And the mostly-English emo stuff. I mix in the latter two; the official package only considers the latter one. That, in and of itself, is fine. Of course we agree on some of their best songs from that era. We both seem to have Vandalize and +Matter in roughly the same spots.

Now, here’s where we disagree. There are a couple of mediocre songs the official album uses. The new single, Fever. Perhaps that isn’t fair, maybe it will grow on me. For now, it’s mid and doesn’t seem to belong. This isn’t Mary Jane’s Last Dance, the song Tom Petty made for his Greatest Hits album that quickly became his most memorable song. It’s just a new song tacked on. It also features Change, which was probably the low point of the album it was on. The band has done better and those two slots could have gone to better songs.

The official playlist also front-loads some of the band’s biggest songs from recent years, whereas I prefer to put them at the end for a grand finale. They also used Prove, most likely because it was licensed by an anime, Beyblade X, and they want to appeal to fans of the show. Similarly, Vandalize was licensed by SEGA for Sonic Frontiers, but this is not that version. That version has clean lyrics. The line “Fuck the pain away” becomes “fight the pain away” and is arguably just as effective; the problem is, it sounds like a radio edit when they should have just recorded it like that. Side note, Taylor Swift has a clean version of her album The Life of a Showgirl, and by clean I mean it’s about half clean… but what she changes, sounds like it should have been there all along. I’m a fan of this album, and I find myself liking the clean version just as much. That’s wild to me. That tells me the artist cares about how the song is presented. ONE OK ROCK didn’t do that, and they could have, and had they done that, I would have used the clean version in my playlist. I assume that’s why the official album doesn’t use it. That one song is why the album has the [E] tag on it. It’s not the band’s only song to be rated as such, but it’s the only one on their Greatest Hits, and mine.

Lastly, they called it Greatest Hits. This isn’t a popular band. They don’t really have “hits”. Mine is called “We Are ONE OK ROCK”, firstly because it uses the song We Are (as does theirs) so it’s a play on words (as is the band’s name; it’s a reference to “one o’clock,” as in 0100, the hour that studio time was the cheapest to rent, and how L and R sound the same in Japanese). And because mine is meant to be shown to someone who’s never heard the band, and it introduces you to them.

So, without further ado, here’s my playlist. You can use Spotify or YouTube Music or Tidal or Deezer or whatever you use to stream music, or you can go to nyaa and torrent a discography and you can build this yourself, however you do music. I’m going to list the songs, and also give the album it’s from. This is mostly important for the first song, as they have several songs called “Introduction”. They haven’t done them recently, but they used to open every album with a different medley of sound effects and music. And I went with the one with sounds from Terminator and the dial-up modem sound, to set you up for something that’s a little technical and sci-fi, sort of.

1. Introduction (Niche Syndrome)
2. We Are (Ambitions)
3. Mighty Long Fall (35xxxv)
4. C.h.a.o.s.m.y.t.h. (Zankyō Reference)
5. The Beginning (Jinsei x Boku =)
6. Liar (Niche Syndrome)
7. Vandalize [E] (Luxury Disease)
8. Make it Out Alive (single)
9. I Was King (Ambitions)
10. Dystopia (Detox)
11. Wasted Nights (Eye of the Storm)
12. Wherever You Are (Niche Syndrome)
13. In the Stars (ft. Kiiara) (Eye of the Storm)
14. Save Yourself (Luxury Disease)
15. Nobody’s Home (Niche Syndrome)
16. Good Goodbye (35xxxv)
17. Let Me Let You Go (Luxury Disease)
18. the same as… (Jinsei x Boku =)
19. Unforgettable (Eye of the Storm)
20. Last Dance (35xxxv)
21. Clock Strikes (Jinsei x Boku =)
22. Renegades (Luxury Disease)
23. Stand Out Fit In (Eye of the Storm)
24. +Matter (Detox)
25. Be the light (Jinsei x Boku =)

Note that track 22, Renegades, was co-written with Ed Sheeran. I know a lot of folks aren’t happy with him over his support of Israel and their genocide in Gaza. It was a memorable song for the band, so it’s a good fit for the playlist, but if your personal morals don’t allow it, it’s fine to skip it.

So, my playlist/album can somewhat be broken up into four acts, which I like. The first act, which ends with The Beginning and the line “it’s finally begun,” introduces you to the band. We Are is about how young people are ready to enter adulthood and want to be taken seriously — it was used in a youth rally in Japan. Mighty Long Fall focuses on the band’s signature hard rock/emo sound. C.h.a.o.s.m.y.t.h. is about friendship, and the memories of growing up.

Then for the second act, it’s really just some of their above-average songs I picked that sound good together. They’ve set the tone, now they’re padding it out. You might find a favourite here, but the songs gradually get better.

The third act is a more proper “greatest hits” kind of thing. The band has established themselves and given you a taste, now they’re breaking out the big guns. Where this happens is up to you. If you like everything you hear, you might deny the second act exists, and the entire middle is the third act. That’s fine.

The fourth act is the grand finale. This is where all the best songs from each album show up. These are the songs that define the band and their sound. The last three in particular all have meaning to the band and their fans. Stand Out Fit In is about growing up Asian (disclaimer: I’m not, so I can’t claim to know about this except what I’ve heard) in the west (disclaimer: they didn’t either, they grew up in Japan), but it’s also about trying to be an individual while also conforming to the society of school. +Matter is about how everybody matters. There’s this discourse online about how you can only matter if you’re a minority because people say you don’t and if you’re a minority your life and safety and rights are constantly being threatened. And I am 100% on board with that. As someone who is not threatened based on their demographic traits, I know people who look like me matter, but we aren’t the focus. We don’t need to be. ONE OK ROCK sidesteps the whole thing by saying “you matter to me.” It might be simple, like something found on a greeting card, but it’s effective. Lastly, Be the light was written for the nuclear accident in Japan, but it was written in such a way that it could be about any tragedy, anywhere. It could be about 9/11 or any other national (or personal) tragedy. It’s like how Fred Rogers once said to look for the helpers. ONE OK ROCK is saying to be those people. Be the light for others, because you can’t change what happened, but you can change what happens in the future, so inspire others by being the hope and dedication they can look toward and rely upon.

So… if you’ve never heard of my favourite band, ONE OK ROCK, you can find them on YouTube or whatever paid streaming service you may use, or you can sail the seas, I don’t judge.