Snow Halation

"Snow Halation" is a pop song by the Japanese idol group μ's as part of the Love Live! multimedia franchise. Composed by Takahiro Yamada with lyrics by Aki Hata, it was released by Lantis as the group's second single on December 22, 2010. The release was accompanied by a six-minute anime music video produced by studio Sunrise. A re-animated sequence was broadcast in June 2014 as an insert song in the ninth episode of the second season of the Love Live! School Idol Project anime television series. "Snow Halation" became a well-known anime song in the 2010s, and it has been cited as representative of the Love Live! franchise. It was performed as one of the final songs at all six of μ's' concerts from 2012 to 2016, and it was the last song they performed at the franchise-wide concert in 2020. In 2019, "Snow Halation" was awarded the Special Prize in the Heisei Anisong Grand Prix for songs of the 2010s. Despite its later popularity, "Snow Halation" only sold enough copies in its initial release to peak at No. 74 on Japan's weekly Oricon singles chart. Yamada has attributed the popularity of the song to the lyrics and the arrangement by Ryosuke Nakanishi. Lyrically, the song describes the narrator's feelings of love and being unable to hold back from expressing them, an emotion they dub a "snow halation". The single has been praised for creating a perfect harmony between the vocals and music, and the choice of words for the lyrics has been called masterful. Background Love Live! School Idol Project was first announced in the July 2010 issue of ASCII Media Works' Dengeki G's Magazine, which revealed that the magazine would be collaborating with the anime studio Sunrise and the music label Lantis to co-produce it. Love Live! officially began with the August 2010 issue of Dengeki G's Magazine, which introduced the story, characters, and a more detailed explanation of the project. Takahiro Yamada made his professional debut as a composer in 2009, with "Good Smile Season" by Natsuko Aso, and one of the songs he composed for Lantis was later chosen to be the debut single for the then-unnamed idol group at the center of Love Live!.