GUERNICA

GUERNICA is a six-track release that ASTERISM published digitally through Amuse on 9 December 2020; the band counts it as its third EP. No CD was made and it carries no catalogue number. It was the band's first new work in about two years, since the full album IGNITION of August 2018, and a later announcement recalled that it had appeared without warning. The six tracks, about 23 minutes in all, are "MUSIC", "Gunfire", "Faced/Burned", "Church", "Day26" and "000", played by HAL-CA on guitar, MIYU on bass and MIO on drums. Having worked under the banner of "battle music", the band this time wrote its songs to a concept, Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica. According to the release-day announcement, the members drew the white sleeve themselves, with a fresh start as its hidden theme. By the band's account, the record put effort into post-production with sounds beyond the band's own instruments, which its previous album had not done, and widened the range of its songs while keeping hard rock and heavy metal at the root; strings and piano phrases appear on the recordings. The credits printed for GUERNICA+a in 2021 give all six songs as written and arranged by ASTERISM, recorded and mixed by Daichi Tokunaga at Ongakudo PLUM. The EP went out to Apple Music, Spotify, LINE MUSIC, Amazon Music and iTunes, among others, and was also sold on the band's Bandcamp page. In response to requests from fans, the six songs were remastered and issued on CD in September 2021, together with four new songs, as the second full album, GUERNICA+a, and its release was marked by the band's first solo concerts, in Fukuoka and Tokyo.