Black Clover has always run on one premise. A loud orphan born with no magic, in a world made entirely of magic, refuses to shut up about becoming Wizard King. So there is a neat symmetry in who the franchise handed its next ending theme to. ONE OR EIGHT take their name from ichi ka bachi ka, the Japanese phrase for a coin-flip gamble, closer to “all or nothing” than to any polite version of it.
The eight-member group debuted in August 2024. Two years on, they are closing episodes of one of Shueisha’s biggest shonen properties. That is not a normal timeline for a Japanese group, and it did not happen by accident.
The Slot, and the Dates
Black Clover 2nd Season starts on 3 October 2026 at 11pm on TV Tokyo and its affiliate stations. ONE OR EIGHT’s Yellow Brick Road is the ending theme, with rock band WANIMA taking the opening with Kienai Riyuu. Crunchyroll has said it will carry the new season as it airs.
The song lands separately as a digital single at midnight JST on 7 October 2026. Japan is an hour ahead of Singapore, so the Japanese broadcast slot falls at 10pm on a Saturday here, which is a far more civilised time to be watching a boy with an anti-magic sword scream at a demon.
8 Members, 1 Coin Flip
The line-up is MIZUKI, NEO, REIA, RYOTA, SOUMA, TAKERU, TSUBASA and YUGA, all Japanese, mostly singing in English. That last part is the strategic bit. Where most J-pop groups build at home first and export later, ONE OR EIGHT were pointed outward from day one, which is why an American festival crowd knew them before a lot of Tokyo did.
The numbers back the approach. Avex’s own announcements put the group at 1.5 million social followers in February 2026, rising to 1.73 million by August, helped along by more than 200,000 user-made videos set to their tracks. Third-party tracker kworb counted roughly 55 million Spotify streams across 11 songs as of late July 2026. For a group that had not existed two years earlier, that is a steep line on a graph.
Critics have been kinder than they usually are to a new group. Reviewing TOKYO DRIFT in February 2026, ArtistRack called them “J-Pop’s new ‘all or nothing’ contender” and noted the group “prioritizes performance skill over mere visuals”. BroadwayWorld’s review of the GATHER tour finale in May described a “high-energy dance-heavy performance” and concluded that “the group has certainly found its footing”.
Then there was Head In The Clouds Los Angeles in August, where Ladygunn named them one of its favourite performances of the festival. ONE OR EIGHT had been added to the bill late and opened the whole thing with what the magazine called a “high-octane set”. Getting a slot at the last minute and turning it into a write-up is the entire ichi ka bachi ka thesis in one afternoon.
The Slot Snow Man Used to Fill
Here is the part that makes this genuinely surprising. Black Clover‘s music has never been a place for experiments. The 2017 to 2021 run cycled through Kankaku Piero, BiSH, Vickeblanka (Black Rover and Black Catcher, both fandom favourites), Kumi Koda, Snow Man and TOMORROW X TOGETHER on openings. The endings went to m-flo, Miyuna, SWANKY DANK and INTERSECTION, all acts with a following already in the bank.
The 2023 film Black Clover: Sword of the Wizard King pushed the same logic further by handing both its main and ending themes to K-pop group TREASURE. The pattern is consistent: book the artist who is already charting, the way anime routinely does when it wants a theme that travels, from RADWIMPS scoring Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume downwards.
This time the franchise booked an artist mid-climb instead of after the summit. For a group two years into its career, an anime ending theme is the sort of placement that usually arrives in year six, if at all.
Black Clover Is Not a Small Show
Some scale, for anyone who dropped off after the first run. The manga has more than 24 million copies in circulation worldwide and wrapped up in 2026. The anime was the most-watched series on Crunchyroll in 2020, viewed across 87 countries and territories. The 2023 film opened in Japanese cinemas and on Netflix globally on the same day.
So the ending theme is not a small stage. Every episode closes on it, week after week, in front of an audience that spans most of the planet. Ask anyone who still has Black Catcher in their liked songs six years later.
There is a local angle too. Singapore is on ONE OR EIGHT’s 2026 Asia dates, alongside Manila and Bangkok, which puts them in the same lane as the Japanese groups who have built real fanbases here through touring rather than through algorithms alone. If the reviews from Los Angeles are any guide, the live set is the strongest argument they have.
🗓️ Date: Black Clover 2nd Season premieres Saturday, 3 October 2026
⏰ Time: 11pm JST, which lands at 10pm in Singapore
📺 Broadcast: TV Tokyo and affiliate stations, with Crunchyroll streaming the season as it airs
🎵 Ending theme: Yellow Brick Road by ONE OR EIGHT
🎧 Digital single: Out at midnight JST on 7 October 2026
🎤 Opening theme: Kienai Riyuu by WANIMA
Four days separate the premiere from the single, which means the first time most people hear Yellow Brick Road it will be playing over end credits with no way to replay it. Fix that in advance: pre-save the single here so it drops into a library on 7 October, block out Saturday 3 October for the premiere, and keep an eye on ONE OR EIGHT’s channels for the Singapore date. A group named after a gamble finally getting a sure thing is worth showing up for.
Visuals courtesy of Avex Music Creative Inc.
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