ASTERISM TRIVIA
Trivia
ASTERISM call their music "mass metal". Their official site and the artist profile published by their management company, Amuse, define it as a new genre: metal that reaches the masses, resonates with them and is loved by them, and the site's own Japanese tagline describes them as an instrumental mass-metal band. The term was already in HAL-CA's comments on the PelleK collaboration in December 2022. It reaches into the writing, too: MIYU told Dead Rhetoric in 2025 that the band has learned how much a strong chorus matters and sometimes deliberately builds songs on a familiar verse-chorus-verse shape to make them easier to take in, while MIO, in the same interview, called anime tie-ins a major stepping stone for taking mass metal further.
The collaboration EP PLANET OF METAL (2024) began with a meeting: ASTERISM and the illustrator Acky Bright met at Anime Expo in Los Angeles in July 2023 and hit it off. The work followed a set order. First the two sides wrote a story together, then Acky Bright drew the artwork from it, and then ASTERISM wrote music that grew out of the pictures. The story is set on a planet at the edge of the galaxy, where a curse said to come from a Mecha Skull is driving the creatures wild; guided by Zom-chan, a zombie they rescued along the way, the band set out to stop it. The tracks are numbered OP and EP1 to EP6 and tell of battles with six enemies, and the band says it wrote as if defeating each foe in turn, with the writing getting harder as the final boss came closer. Instrumental music, HAL-CA told Dead Rhetoric in 2025, leaves listeners more room to imagine, which is why it sits so well with visual art.
HAL-CA reached THE FIRST TAKE ahead of her band, and on her own. FLASH THE FIRST TAKE, the channel's newer project of 60-second one-take performances in vertical video, posted her first appearance on 26 October 2024: "METAL", which she sang while playing. Her second, "Planet Of Metal", was according to THE FIRST TIMES the first instrumental the project had carried, and the site noted that commenters had taken to calling her the "Lightning Fingers Girl". As HAL-CA explained to Dead Rhetoric in 2025, that earlier connection, followed by the song the band wrote with Marty Friedman, is what led to the invitation onto THE FIRST TAKE itself, where ASTERISM made their first appearance with Friedman, performing "GYUTTO!!", in April 2025.
The theme of the fourth full album Kick Down the Wall (2026) is growing up. Having played together since they were teenagers, children really, the members said when announcing it, they had found a wall inside themselves, born of the protective way people looked at them, from being praised as good players for their age, and from a tangle of complexes. The past few years had brought them feelings and thoughts that never surfaced in their teens, and the album is where they hurled that conflict and stress. What they want listeners to hear, they said, is music that only the people they are now could have written and played.
Two songs on IGNITION, the band's first full album (2018), feature Bootsy Collins and Buckethead, and the route to them ran through Facebook. Since forming, MIO told J-Generation in 2019, the band had been posting rehearsal and concert clips there; one of them caught Collins's attention and he reposted it to his own page, in 2016 according to a column on THE FIRST TIMES, which credits the share with spreading the band's name fast. The band then wrote to him and asked him to produce two of the album's tracks; he said yes, and he brought in Buckethead. Announcing the album, the band introduced Collins as the musician who had discovered ASTERISM before anyone else in the world. The official discography credits him with production, bass and voice on "BLAZE" and "Warning", with Buckethead on guitar.
According to BARKS, ASTERISM, an instrumental band from the start, first released a recording with vocals in December 2022: the single made with PelleK, on which HAL-CA shared the lead vocal with him on a cover of King Gnu's 「一途」. The major-label debut EP ASIDE, in March 2023, was the first record with vocals on every track. Announcing it, HAL-CA said the band wanted to carry its music in words and voice as well as on instruments; MIYU described singing as a new weapon for reaching more people and admitted that writing vocal songs the band was happy with had been hard and slow; for MIO, the question was whether a voice would merely add a fourth part or multiply what the three could do. Combining guitar and singing, HAL-CA told AniPlaylist in 2024 with a laugh, was very hard for her.
HAL-CA's connection with Marty Friedman began when she appeared with him on the music show ROCK FUJIYAMA. Playing ASTERISM's "STARS" together on the programme, Friedman told Guitar World in 2026, reminded him of playing with Jason Becker. In the same interview he praised her rhythm playing, "a precise machine-gun right hand" in his words, as something he wished he had, said she does things he does not do, such as tapping and whammy-bar work, in a way he likes, and declared that if forced to pick a favourite among Japan's female rock guitarists, it would be her. According to HAL-CA, speaking to Dead Rhetoric in 2025, it was Friedman who then said he wanted to write a song with ASTERISM; the result was "GYUTTO!!", unveiled as a surprise at Guitar Monsters Japan in March 2025.
The first full-scale show ASTERISM ever played was at the same Yamaha contest that had brought them together. At the Kyushu–Okinawa final of the 9th Music Revolution, held at DRUM LOGOS on 1 November 2015, they took both an excellence award and the audience award. Yamaha's own results table lists the winner not as ASTERISM but under HAL-CA's name, with "Rising Moon" as the piece performed. The song later got a music video, which went onto the DVD that comes with the limited first edition of IGNITION, the band's first full album (2018).
The 2020 EP GUERNICA was written with Pablo Picasso's Guernica as its concept, and its striking white sleeve was drawn by the drummer, MIO, around a hidden theme of starting over. Coming about two years after the band's previous new release, the EP also went beyond the band's own instruments into post-production work the earlier records had not tried. In 2021, in response to requests from fans, four unreleased songs were added and the set was issued on CD as GUERNICA+a, the band's second full album.
Animetic (2022) was ASTERISM's first record of anime-song covers, and the members chose the tracks themselves from theme songs of anime from the 2000s onward. All three are fans, MIYU told AniPlaylist in 2024, so they pick the covers from the series and songs they love. Asked about 「君の知らない物語」, the ending theme of Bakemonogatari, MIO said that he and MIYU both adore the Monogatari series and simply had to cover it. The band unveiled new artist photos, a new logo and a renewed official website at the same moment the album was announced.
The "Unravel" collaboration with the Norwegian singer PelleK was made back to front. The starting point was ASTERISM's finished instrumental version from Animetic, and PelleK's vocal was laid over it afterwards. That raised a question HAL-CA has described: keep the lead guitar, which sounded more like ASTERISM, or mute it to clear room for the voice? The band decided together while checking the mix, and in the final version voice and lead guitar wind around each other. The video was shot at KT Zepp Yokohama when PelleK came to Japan in early September 2022, and the song was one he had already covered once on his own channel.
The video for "Fiction", lead track of the fourth EP ASIDE, was a string of firsts for ASTERISM. It was shot at a factory whose night-time lights look like something out of a film or a video game, which the band's announcement calls a "mako reactor", with the band playing to an audience inside the grounds. MIYU noted that it was the band's first location shoot outdoors, and as their first video for a sung track it had HAL-CA acting for the first time: lip-syncing seated on a chair, clutching her head, throwing a chair. Worried about the weather, she had made a rain-charm doll the day before; the rain came only as drizzle, and she felt the after-rain look suited the film. MIO marked the occasion by painting a design of his own on the bass drum head.
BESIDE (2023), the band's fifth EP, was its second EP of sung songs, and the video for its lead track "STARDOM" is built from homages to the hard rock and heavy metal legends ASTERISM look up to. The costumes came from SNACK NGL, a creative team of two stylists, one of them formerly of [Alexandros], who put together seventeen outfits for it. HAL-CA enjoyed the many changes of costume and make-up; MIO described the film as a parody of the legendary greats the three had followed since they were small, and said that watching the finished cut together set all three of them laughing. When AniPlaylist pointed out its nods to AC/DC, Guns N' Roses and BABYMETAL in 2024, HAL-CA answered that they had wanted to bring in bands they deeply respect.
At FOX_FEST, BABYMETAL's own festival at Saitama Super Arena on 25 and 26 May 2024, ASTERISM appeared as METALVERSE's guest band. The band's own announcement listed the performers as BABYMETAL, Electric Callboy, Polyphia, Bilmuri and "METALVERSE (Guest Band ASTERISM)", explaining that ASTERISM would perform together with METALVERSE. A column on THE FIRST TIMES describes the trio as METALVERSE's backing band that day, and MIO, speaking to AniPlaylist later that year, recalled simply that they had played FOX_FEST with METALVERSE.
"Metal Gandhara", made with Pineapple Express, a progressive fusion band from Bangalore, was the first song either band had written with another act. ASTERISM say they chose the title because they wanted to build a utopia for metal. The video was shot in Pineapple Express's home city of Bangalore by an Indian crew of about a hundred, director and producer included; against Indian folk instruments floating in mid-air, the three members of ASTERISM and the five of Pineapple Express play off one another. The collaboration, MIO told Dead Rhetoric in 2025, brought ASTERISM to Indian listeners and let the band fold something of Indian musicality into its own sound.
"Blink of Ray", the opening track of the fourth full album Kick Down the Wall, is the song chosen for the Apple Watch commercial "Message from the Heart". As a column on THE FIRST TIMES describes it, the ad retells a true Apple Watch story about a metal fan who gets back to the concerts he loves, with part of the song playing over footage of a blazing-hot live house. The band calls it the most vicious-sounding metal song it has made, pointing to its odd time signatures, its drive and its choruses that seem to slide out of step with one another. It was released digitally on 8 October 2025, and the band's own upload of the music video names the commercial in its title.
In October 2026 HAL-CA's guitar could be heard on weekday mornings by an audience of babies. TV Tokyo's 「シナぷしゅ」 (Shinapushu), the first programme for babies on a Japanese commercial network, has a popular segment that plays one song for a whole month, and HAL-CA played guitar on its song for October 2026, 「はいはい戦隊からふるべいびーず」. The singer was Hironobu Kageyama, known for "CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA" from Dragon Ball Z, and the song aired from 1 to 31 October.
ASTERISM was not the members' own idea. In 2014 HAL-CA entered Yamaha's 8th Music Revolution contest as a solo guitarist in the Fukuoka heat, while MIYU and MIO played the Saga heat as a bass-and-drums duo. As BARKS reported when the band made its debut in 2017, a Yamaha staff member who had watched both heats sensed that the three of them together might produce something new, and approached both sides. MIO told Asian Junkie in 2019 that the staffer thought putting them together would be exciting and then introduced them to each other; HAL-CA, speaking to Dead Rhetoric in 2025, remembered it as a suggestion from someone who had seen her solo set.
ASTERISM means a cluster of stars. According to BARKS's report on the band's debut in 2017, the image behind the name is of separate stars, each giving off its own light, gathering into something that shines brighter together, and with it the wish that the three would play as one more than ever before. A column on THE FIRST TIMES in 2025 gives the same account of the name.
Each of the three traces the start to a different hero. For HAL-CA it was Loudness: she told Asian Junkie in 2019 that her first Loudness concert left her longing to stand on a large stage and play guitar like Akira Takasaki, and that the memory of that excitement still pushes her on when practice wears her down. Asked by AniPlaylist in 2024 which artists she would like to work with, she named Loudness again and said they were the reason she started playing guitar. In the same 2019 interview MIYU named Billy Sheehan of Mr. Big as the reason for choosing the bass, and MIO credited TOTO with leading the way into music.
The song on IGNITION that took longest to finish was "DAWN". When HAL-CA first played it to the others, she told J-Generation in 2019, it was a fragment of under a minute: an intro, a riff and an ending, nothing more. The three agreed it was worth building on, each wrote parts of their own, and the pieces were assembled into a track of nearly ten minutes, the longest the band had made. None of them had expected it to grow that long. She has come to love it, she said, because each member's signature sound can be heard in it.
Around 2019 ASTERISM described their music as "battle music". HAL-CA explained to Asian Junkie that year that the idea shaped both the writing and the shows, and that it meant two things: the three of them battling one another as players, and music that helps listeners stand up to something bad or take a step forward. To J-Generation the same year she called her bandmates great partners and her biggest rivals at once, while MIO joked that in front of a crowd he tries to play hard enough that his two bandmates get blown off the stage. The phrase was still the band's keyword when GUERNICA+a was announced in 2021.
The cover of Eve's 「廻廻奇譚」 that went out in May 2022 as the first single from Animetic came with what the members called an "instru-lyric" video: an instrumental with words running across the screen as if it had lyrics. The words are onomatopoeia for what the guitar, bass and drums are playing, and, as the director GAC revealed, the members transcribed them themselves. HAL-CA found writing their own playing down as text a strange and enjoyable experience; MIYU pointed viewers to shots that pay homage to characters from Jujutsu Kaisen.
In February 2023 ASTERISM were one of three young bands in the second round of NEXT GENERATION NEXT CREATION, a music-and-video project for Sanyo Foods' Cup Star instant noodles. The rule was that each song had to last three minutes, the time it takes from pouring in the hot water to eating. The band treated the brief as a three-minute timer to raise your fists to while you wait, wrote 「カップスターの唄~ASTERISMより愛を込めて~」, and, in its own words, used a guitar solo with a Japanese flavour to say that this is a cup noodle that represents Japan. A student from a design lab at Tokyo University of the Arts directed the video.
Anime Expo in Los Angeles has become one of ASTERISM's footholds abroad: they played its opening ceremony in July 2023 and appeared again in 2024 and 2025, three years running. According to Dead Rhetoric, it was the anime-cover album Animetic that first brought them to the convention's attention. MIO told the site that when they play those covers there, the whole crowd sings along even though the band plays them as instrumentals, an atmosphere rarely found anywhere else and the reason they keep coming back.