Delicious in Dungeon's official soundtrack is a meal of its own
The culinary fantasy adventure is held together by a score which is as playful as it is creative.
by Rollin Bishop
I love music. I'm not a particularly talented musician or singer, though I'll happily sing along in the car, but I've loved music as long as I can remember. My parents' first date was at a Journey concert. I grew up listening to Metallica and Talking Heads and Eagles blasted way too loud on a cobbled-together home stereo system covered in black mesh my father dubbed The Wall. To me, music is integral.
So when it comes to animation, music's a core pillar; if the soundtrack doesn't work or is dissonant in some way, the whole thing falls apart. It's woven through every single frame, stitching it together like note-based thread into a harmonious whole. So it should really come as no surprise that I love the Delicious in Dungeon soundtrack.
Delicious in Dungeon, if you're not familiar, is a 2024 anime adapted by Studio Trigger from the popular manga by Ryoko Kui. I'd long been a fan of the manga before the anime was ever even announced, so it's somewhat difficult to accurately summarize, but the short version is: a group of adventurers delve deep into a dungeon in order to save the party's cleric who was eaten by a menacing red dragon and left behind, and for reasons monetary, personal, and logistical, they end up killing, cooking, and eating a whole bunch of monsters on their way down.
The anime's soundtrack — credited to Yasunori Mitsuda and Shunsuke Tsuchiya — is, naturally, somewhat fantastical and ethereal. If your mind immediately jumps to the lute, you've got the idea. (For the sake of this piece, I'm specifically talking about the official soundtrack and not the opening and ending songs like, for example, BUMP OF CHICKEN's "Sleep Walking Orchestra," which are admittedly also all bangers and deserving of praise.)
It can be bombastic and it can be gentle and soft, but most of all the Delicious in Dungeon soundtrack feels warm. It's bright, and often cheerful, but diverse in how it uses all of its ingredients together. It's, in a word, lovely. In a second word, it's truly delicious. Well, second and third words.
But what takes this from a simple instance of "I bought a CD I like" to "this soundtrack is maybe one of my favorites in recent memory" is its playfulness. Anime soundtracks, especially for anything with serious action, can be energetic easily enough, but being joyful? That's not as common.
The best example of what I mean is track 11 on the first disc — "We Did It" — and it's the one I keep coming back to when introducing the Delicious in Dungeon official soundtrack to new folks. It plays whenever the party successfully cooks a new meal over an image of said food all splayed out and looking scrumptious and cooked to perfection. What's the track like, you might wonder?
It's five seconds of horns heralding the entry of the food with some extremely light percussion. That's it. That's the whole thing. The track is 11 seconds long, and four of those are silent.
Perfection.
/out of frame
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