One of my personal favorite songwriter/composers of the 21st century is Japanese artist Sawano Hiroyuki. His career has been mostly within forms of popular Japanese media, including TV anime series like Attack on Titan and 86: Eighty-Six, and was involved in several video game scores. Some of the individual track names from these soundtracks are intuitive (such as the titular song “Attack on Titan” from its first season), while others are much more confusing, even nonsensical. When I first heard the music he composed, these titles made it fairly difficult to find my favorite tracks, so I would listen to the entirety of the soundtrack to find the song (or songs) I was looking for, and in doing so, learned a lot about why I like his music so much.
First is the instrumentation and vocalization Hiroyuki uses in his pieces. Many feature an arrangement of string instruments and a choir, giving a harmonious, orchestral presentation to the song. Interestingly though, despite being Japanese, he will write songs with not just lyrics in his native language, but also in English and German, as well as general harmonized chords with no language attached. That said, not all pieces with a choir are as uplifting and harmonized as they are typically known in soundtracks — for certain scenes or moods, he will create dissonance between the voices and/or the accompanying instruments to create a feeling of tension, unease, or dread to build suspense.
However, Hiroyuki doesn’t just write orchestral scores — he also composes songs in a more traditional sense as well, emphasizing the main singer with supporting electric and bass guitars, drums, piano, and even other vocalists. These projects fall under his alternative artist name, SawanoHiroyuki[nZk], which features a current 5-album discography. Occasionally he will invite famous vocalists and musicians to perform his pieces, such as Aimer, LiSA, Sukima Switch, ReoNa, and several others, making them more popular in the J-Pop and J-Rock crowds/genres.
I think this variety in his discography is why he became my most listened-to artist on Spotify last year (on top of the admitted frequency that I listen to his pieces). Plus, the media that he has been involved in has been either independently some of my favorites, or had the experience elevated as a result of his scores.