BABYMETAL Trivia — 27 Entries
27 sourced facts about BABYMETAL.
Trivia
BABYMETAL did not start as a band in its own right. It began in 2010 as the "heavy music club" — a club-activity unit inside the idol group Sakura Gakuin. The conceit reached the styling too: in an early interview YUIMETAL explained that because BABYMETAL was an after-school club unit, they wore nail polish and heavier make-up to underline it.
Producer KOBAMETAL has described exactly how "BABYMETAL DEATH" was commissioned. The brief was a song to open the live show, and the image he passed on was a ritual for summoning a god. He asked arranger Yuyoyuppe to fuse symphonic metal with death and thrash, and to salt the structure with the genre's stock phrases so that anyone who knows metal would smirk in recognition. The lyric is nothing but each member's name followed by "death" — he wanted an introduction piece, and describes the idea as BABYMETAL's answer to the Mickey Mouse March.
The choreography is by MIKIKO, the choreographer behind Perfume. The routines are not simply handed down, though: moves the members improvise while messing about have caught MIKIKO's eye and gone straight into the show. Their habit before going on is to form a huddle. In an early interview SU-METAL described the goal as making anyone who watches think "what on earth was that" and, in the same breath, that they want to see it again.
The first world tour came in the summer of 2014. At Britain's Sonisphere Festival they drew a main-stage crowd of sixty-five thousand, and in the United States they opened five dates of Lady Gaga's North American tour. It was the same year their debut album BABYMETAL entered the Billboard 200.
Their Billboard 200 placings have climbed release by release. The 2014 debut BABYMETAL peaked at 187. METAL RESISTANCE reached 39 in 2016 — the first Japanese act inside the top 40 in fifty-three years. METAL GALAXY hit 13 in 2019 and simultaneously became the first album by an Asian band to top Billboard's Top Rock Albums chart, on a first week of 28,000 units, 27,000 of them physical and 1,000 from streaming (METAL RESISTANCE had opened on just under 13,000). Then in 2025 METAL FORTH entered at 9, the first Japanese band ever inside the Billboard 200's top ten.
In April 2016 BABYMETAL became the first Japanese act to headline Wembley Arena in London. The same month brought their second album METAL RESISTANCE, and that September they closed the world tour with two nights at Tokyo Dome, drawing 110,000 people across the pair.
Their 2019 Glastonbury appearance came with an odd wrinkle: the booking was confirmed so late that their own fans could not get tickets. Braced for a hostile room at a festival that books few metal acts, they found BRING ME THE HORIZON on the same stage directly after them. Watching that set, SU-METAL says, was what convinced her they could work somewhere other than a metal festival.
The relationship with BRING ME THE HORIZON began at an awards ceremony: the 2015 Relentless Kerrang! Awards, where BABYMETAL took The Spirit Of Independence Award and BMTH took Best British Band. They met there and kept talking whenever festivals brought them together. The 2020 collaboration "Kingslayer" came as an offer from BMTH with the vocal parts already mapped out, and SU-METAL's reaction was to wonder whether she had been given too much — whether she should really be singing the chorus of a BMTH song. The pandemic ruled out meeting, so it was finished by sending files back and forth; BMTH also asked for Japanese, and several versions of the spoken line that closes the song were recorded. Throughout the period when BABYMETAL's live activity was sealed away, BMTH kept playing the song at festivals.
On 19 October 2018 BABYMETAL announced through their official site that YUIMETAL was leaving. She had been on hiatus from the group since missing a Hiroshima date the previous December for health reasons; members and staff had gone on supporting her stated wish to return and had been preparing for her to appear on the Japan tour opening on 23 October. In the end, the announcement said, it was her own decision to skip those dates and leave. She had been an original member, with eight years in the group. In a comment issued under her own name, Yui Mizuno gave two reasons: her health was still not what it needed to be, and she wanted to move towards a dream she had held for some time.
In December 2020, ten years after the group formed, BABYMETAL released their first best-of, 10 BABYMETAL YEARS. Between January and April 2021 they followed it with ten headline shows at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo under the banner 10 BABYMETAL BUDOKAN. Then, on 10 October that year, they sealed away their live activity.
The return from that sealing came in three stages. On 1 April 2022 a project called THE OTHER ONE began, framed as the restoration — by way of a virtual world named METALVERSE — of a BABYMETAL nobody had known about. On 28 and 29 January 2023 came the shows that broke the seal, BABYMETAL RETURNS - THE OTHER ONE -. And on 1 and 2 April 2023 at Pia Arena MM, BABYMETAL BEGINS - THE OTHER ONE - launched the three-member line-up of SU-METAL, MOAMETAL and MOMOMETAL. Four months on, MOAMETAL said it still felt strongly like being reborn as a new group.
THE OTHER ONE is BABYMETAL's first concept album, presented as the restoration of songs by a BABYMETAL nobody knew existed. Ten parallel worlds, said to exist across time and space, are projected onto ten tracks, each carrying a keyword: throne, cavalry, mirror, illusion, transition, smoke, coffin and so on. The second track, "Divine Attack - Shingeki -," was the first song SU-METAL had a hand in writing the lyrics for, and was also the album's first lead track.
In 2025 BABYMETAL set up an American base, BABYMETAL WORLD LLC, and signed a global label partnership with Hollywood-headquartered Capitol Records. SU-METAL calls it the start of BABYMETAL's "Season 2" and a declaration that they are going at the wider world in earnest. Behind it lay two or three years of growing response abroad and an audience skewing younger. METAL FORTH, released that year, came out worldwide on the same day — 8 August, having originally been set for 13 June.
Making "RATATATA," the Electric Callboy collaboration on METAL FORTH, turned into an argument over a chant. BABYMETAL wanted the "hoo hoo" call in; Electric Callboy asked why it was there at all, said Germans would not get it, and wanted it cut back. The discussion ran right up to the day of the video shoot. What settled it was FOX_FEST in Japan, where the crowd delivered the chant at full volume and Electric Callboy saw the point. The two acts had also shared a stage at Rock am Ring in Germany in 2024.
Before a new song is performed in public, the three of them will have danced it something like a hundred times. MOAMETAL's explanation is that they work it until it looks effortless from the outside. Rehearsals leave them gasping, and they practise together almost daily for a simple reason: alone, she says, you give up.
The two-night headline run at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo in March 2014 set a record: the youngest female act ever to headline the hall.
"Ijime, Dame, Zettai," the single that marked their major-label debut, was not new when it came out. It had been in the live set since 2010, not long after the group formed, and only reached shops as a single on 9 January 2013. The song sets SU-METAL's straight-ahead vocal against the comic backing and screams of YUIMETAL and MOAMETAL over melodic speed metal, arguing against bullying.
"Catch me if you can" went into the studio with nobody knowing who would sing what. The lyrics were still being written right up to the session, so the parts had not been assigned and were tried out on the spot. The verse was built from a specific picture: YUIMETAL and MOAMETAL, in the middle of a game of tag, hiding in a drainpipe and grinning. The two were deliberately left undirected and simply told to sing freely — KOBAMETAL's stated reason is that he wanted whatever accident came out of an unconstrained take. The sound had been settled first, in any case: industrial metal and digi-rock came before the lyrical theme, not after.
The early sound was divided among several writers. "Headbangeeeeerrrrr!!!!!" came from EDOMETAL and NARASAKI, and its B-side "Uki Uki ★ Midnight" was Yuyoyuppe's first piece of BABYMETAL work. NARASAKI has said that what he builds around is the beauty of SU-METAL's upper register when she pushes, while for YUIMETAL and MOAMETAL he aims to draw out childlike charm. Because every BABYMETAL song is written to a stated concept, he found the image easy to grasp; the hard part, by his account, was aligning that image with the producers.
"Ijime, Dame, Zettai" contains a passage in which YUIMETAL and MOAMETAL race each other from one side of the stage to the other — YUIMETAL described it herself in a 2012 conversation, in which MOAMETAL also mentioned that all three of them were still at middle school. In the same exchange they listed the fox sign and headbanging as the poses and moves they always do.
In 2019 BABYMETAL played their first headline arena show, at The Forum in Los Angeles — the same year METAL GALAXY set new Billboard marks for them.
The first tour the three-piece went out on was not their own. Straight after the Pia Arena MM shows in April 2023 they crossed Europe as special guests on SABATON's THE TOUR TO END ALL TOURS, a bill of SABATON, LORDI and BABYMETAL. It was their first world touring since 2020, and by SU-METAL's account they had no idea whether anyone was still waiting for them when SABATON made the offer. Asia and Australia followed — Australia for the first time, Indonesia for the first time in ten years.
"Metali!! (feat. Tom Morello)," the first new song from the three-piece, is built around the idea of a summer festival in "Meta village," with Tom Morello of RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE on guitar. SU-METAL explains that the reason the session gave her no trouble was that the song felt like the best parts of "PA PA YA!! (feat. F.HERO)" and "Megitsune" combined. Years of singing "PA PA YA!!" on world tours had pushed her delivery steadily more brash, and the folk-song inflection of "Megitsune" was something she had picked up on stage. Both, she says, came out of her naturally here.
"from me to u feat. Poppy" on METAL FORTH was written by Jordan Fish, formerly of BRING ME THE HORIZON. He and BABYMETAL had been talking about working together since his time in that band, so the idea had been around for a while. The two acts filmed separately and never met on the video shoot, but SU-METAL had met Poppy earlier at a festival in Brazil, where they talked briefly backstage and Poppy told her she was a fan. The video is unusual for BABYMETAL in that dance carries it.
"Song 3 (BABYMETAL x Slaughter to Prevail)" on METAL FORTH is built on the number three. It counts "one, two, three" over and over like a counting song, and the running time was fixed at three minutes thirty-three seconds. The vocal split is inverted from the usual: SU-METAL sings roughly the chorus and, by her own count, about four lines. What fills the rest is MOMOMETAL's death voice — she takes the first verse, Slaughter to Prevail's Alex the second, and from there they trade back and forth.
"Kon! Kon! (feat. Bloodywood)" on METAL FORTH was made the other way round from usual: the Indian metal band Bloodywood built the track and BABYMETAL wrote over it. SU-METAL's first impression of the backing alone was that it was overwhelmingly Indian — until lyrics about yokai went on top and it turned Japanese, and then the dance went on and Bollywood came back through. Learning the choreography meant studying Indian dance, whose movements took some getting used to, and the amount of time spent in a half-crouch makes it physically punishing. There is Hindi rap in it too.
"White Flame" on METAL FORTH belongs to the melodic speed metal line that runs through "Akatsuki" and "Amore" — after red and blue, SU-METAL says, comes white. She wrote the words herself around the idea of a white sun: you cannot look straight at the sun, and she wanted melodic speed metal to carry the wish to see its light anyway. The lyric was written deliberately in short, simple phrases.