The title is the whole song in one word. AIZO is 愛憎, love and hate fused together, and King Gnu chant it in doubles until it stops sounding like two feelings: "愛憎愛憎渦巻いて" [love-hate, love-hate, swirling]. The English hook does the same thing with less subtlety, swinging from "Love me, love me" to "Kill me, kill me" in four lines. It is a bit much, and that is the point.
The setting is a city that has lost its head. "大東京狂騒歌って" [singing the frenzy of Great Tokyo] turns Tokyo into a party nobody can leave, and later the singer admits "今の東京では正気じゃ居られない" [you can't stay sane in Tokyo right now]. Inside that noise the narrator asks to be accepted as a mess: "未完成な私を認めて" [accept the unfinished me]. My favourite detail is the old-fashioned language mixed in. "然らば又逢いましょう" [farewell, then, let's meet again] uses 然らば, a stiff, samurai-drama way of saying goodbye, and "咬ませ狗の武者震い" [the warrior's trembling of an underdog] borrows 咬ませ犬, slang for the loser set up to make someone else look good, plus 武者震い, the shiver a warrior gets before battle. So the narrator is the designated loser who refuses to stay down: "ヤラレっぱなしじゃ" [if I just keep taking the hits] "大人しくはなれない" [I can't stay quiet].
There is no tidy ending. "騙し騙しで良いの" [it's fine to keep fooling ourselves] and "代償なんて気にしないよ" [I don't care about the price] sound reckless and a little defiant, and the last plea is simply "此処を連れ出して" [take me out of here]. For a learner, notice how often lines end in て forms like 渦巻いて and 抱き合って: the song keeps stringing actions together without ever stopping to resolve them.
King Gnu is a Japanese band formed in 2013, first under the names Mrs.Vinci and Srv.Vinci before settling on King Gnu in 2017. The lineup is Daiki Tsuneta on vocals and guitar, Satoru Iguchi on vocals and keyboards, Kazuki Arai on bass and Yu Seki on drums.
After early releases through Perimetron, they made their major label debut on Ariola Japan in January 2019. That year their single "Hakujitsu" took them to NHK's Kōhaku Uta Gassen, and they returned in 2022 with "Stardom". Their 2020 album Ceremony sold over a million copies, and later singles include "Chameleon", "Specialz" and "Aizo". Tsuneta is also part of the creative collective Millennium Parade.