ASIDE

On 21 March 2023 ASTERISM announced its major debut on SME Records, and ten days later, at midnight Japan time on 31 March, the label released the fourth EP, ASIDE, worldwide as a download and stream. It was the first record on which the instrumental band put its own voices on every song, and the members described it as their first EP of songs with singing. The band had first sung on a cover, 「一途」, released with PelleK the previous December, but ASIDE was the first time it released songs of its own with vocals. The EP came out only digitally; its five songs reached CD on the third full album, DECIDE, in November. The five songs are "Fiction", "choir", "Hullabaloo", "LIVE HOUSE" and "METAL", all with lyrics by HAL-CA. HAL-CA said the band wrote vocal songs to carry its music in words and voice as well as on instruments, and to express as fully as it could the idea it calls mass metal: metal that reaches, moves and is loved by the masses. MIYU described the voice as a new weapon that rests on what the band had built in its instrumental songs, and admitted that making vocal songs the trio was satisfied with had been hard and slow. MIO recalled asking whether singing would merely add one more part to three instruments or multiply what the three could do, and said the search had not been easy. On 14 April the video for the lead track, "Fiction", went online: the band plays for an audience inside a factory lit up at night, styled as a "Mako Reactor". The members called it their first vocal-song video, and it was also their first shoot outdoors; in some scenes HAL-CA lip-syncs the vocal while seated in a chair. In the same month the band played KNOTFEST JAPAN 2023 at Makuhari Messe. The follow-up vocal EP, BESIDE, came out on 1 September, and on 1 November the ten songs of the two EPs, together with "Shooting Star", appeared on CD as DECIDE.