Headless Chicken

Before it ever reached Pump It Up, "Headless Chicken" had already built a reputation in the O2Jam series, where its user-made SHD chart became infamous for burying players under walls of simultaneous notes. It came to PIU in XX via the 2.04.0 update, keeping its drumstep identity at a laid-back 90.5 BPM. The name is no accident: electronic sounds in the dubstep sections are shaped to resemble a clucking bird, and the motif is thought to reference Mike the Headless Chicken, earning the song its affectionate "headless chicken" nickname.

The background animation is the work of JesP, who also produced the BGAs for MATADOR and Your Mind. It tells a bizarre tale in which rabbits behead a string of chickens with an axe, seal the heads in glass jars, and watch them sprout new legs and charge a rabbit holed up in a castle. Odd plot aside, its visuals, reminiscent of an early-2000s Adobe Flash cartoon, drew sharp criticism, and this BGA appears to have been JesP's last contribution to the Pump It Up series.

On PHOENIX the song offers Single S6, S10, S15, S19, and S21 alongside Double D12, D17, and D21, with charts credited to AEVILUX. The low BPM is a trap: players used to faster scroll speeds frequently misread the S10 and need to raise their AV. The S19 layers twists with drills, stairs, and side drills, demanding that you prep the opposite-side twist during the finale, which makes earning an S rank while twisting tricky. The S21 beefs up a "sewing machine" pattern in the spirit of Loki and folds in hold notes. In Double, the D21 mixes high-angle twists with drills and a left/right foot swap on the C and 1 panels. The Co-Op chart, in the style of Club Night, was designed so it can also be cleared solo by hitting hidden notes, with a solo-equivalent difficulty around D24.

In EZ2ON REBOOT:R the track returns remastered by r300k himself, displayed at double the original tempo (181 BPM) with a correspondingly faster scroll. That version officially adopted a fan-made BGA by Lyrebird Ferdinant, created in reaction to the much-maligned XX animation. It marked only the second time a fan-made BGA was taken on officially, following AntiDOT back in the EZ2AC era.