“The Rumbling” by SiM is the latest opening/credits song to the shockingly bloody hit anime Attack on Titan, and judging by its Spotify streaming numbers (65 million, and the song’s only been out for 8 months) it’s one of the most-listened-to metal songs of 2022. It’s the most brutal metal song I’ve ever heard used as the theme for a Japanese anime, which makes sense because the show is so unrelentingly violent.

It also has a flattened tonic (Do-flat or De in movable solfege), a note which isn’t supposed to exist.

Why Do-Flat Doesn’t Exist in Traditional Music Theory…

I’ve got to take a step back to explain what I mean by “a note which isn’t supposed to exist.” This note doesn’t exist in a classical music theory system called “solfege.” Solfege is a system where you label each note with a special syllable to track what role it plays in a song’s key or scale. ((This is a system called “movable-do” solfege. There is also a system of “fixed-do” solfege, in which C is always Do, and D is always Re, no matter what key you’re in.)) The home note of a scale, the note that the scale or key is named after, is called “Do.” So if a song is in F major, F is Do; if a song is in G major, G is Do. In a regular major scale, the next note above Do is Re, and the next is Mi, and so on.

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