BRIDEAR Trivia — 10 Entries
10 sourced facts about BRIDEAR.
Trivia
The spelling BRIDEAR was made by turning an existing phrase around. Neither KIMI nor HARU had been in an all-female band before, and they started from the idea that the name should make it obvious at a glance that this was one. BRIDE came up early, but on its own it did not feel right against the music they wanted to play. What settled it was the phrase DEAR BRIDE, which happened to catch their eye: reversed, it gave them BRIDEAR. KIMI's stated reasons for choosing it are that it reads as a women's band and that it simply looks good written down.
"Fake World," on Bloody Bride, is the one song on the record that BRIDEAR did not write. It came from you, formerly the guitarist of Janne Da Arc, and it happened because the two acts were with the same management at the time. KIMI and HARU had both listed Janne Da Arc among their favourite artists in their official profiles long before this; they grew up on the band. KIMI describes writing lyrics to the song and then recording it as real pressure, and admits to being unsettled by seeing her own name in the credits next to his.
The reason HARU plays bass at all involves the same person who wrote "Fake World." The first instrument she picked up was not a bass but a guitar, and she picked it up because of you. Playing it, she decided she was never going to play guitar like that, and switched to bass. More than a decade later she found herself recording one of his songs on the instrument she had switched to — and says she was shaking while she did it. He told her to play it however she liked; she chose to keep the phrases from his demo and work around them.
BRIDEAR started out without knowing that the scene they were about to be filed under existed. KIMI says that in the band's early Fukuoka days they were simply out of the loop: they knew of Aldious, but had no idea a whole "jou-metal" scene had already formed around such bands. Their reasoning was plainer than that — girls playing metal would look great, and in Fukuoka they would be the first. It was only once they began travelling to play elsewhere that they realised they had been swept into a movement already under way.
Expose Your Emotions, the album that became BRIDEAR's major-label debut, was written before anyone knew it would be one. KIMI recalls that while they were making the songs it had not been settled that avex would release it: they made what they wanted to make, then sat with the question of whether avex would sign off on it. It came out on avex trax on December 4, 2019.
"Mirror," the second song on Expose Your Emotions, came out of two different hands. AYUMI — who had joined only that January — wrote the music and brought it in without words, leaving the lyric to KIMI. What came back was built on Through the Looking-Glass. AYUMI describes it as a kind of song BRIDEAR had not done before, and says its groove gave the whole band trouble.
"A Glorious World," on Bloody Bride, is the first song NATSUMI ever wrote. She had no interest in composing when the band made the previous album; listening to what the others were bringing in changed that. She has never been taught theory or chords, and describes putting chords under a melody she had in her head purely by ear. Nor did it sail through — it is the survivor of several she submitted. The lyric came with a request attached: she asked KIMI to write something about being grateful to everyone.
There is a concrete reason the proportion of English lyrics jumps on Bloody Bride: the album was set for simultaneous release in the UK and Europe through SETSUZOKU RECORDS, and KIMI decided that if it was going out there, more of it should be in English. Doing it was another matter — she admits to breaking down at the engineer more than once during the sessions. She got something out of it too. Singing in Japanese, she had never had to think about how to hold a vowel or where the voice would resonate; in English she had to think about all of it, and that is when she realised how much she had been leaning on her own language.
For NATSUMI, who joined in 2019, Expose Your Emotions was the first recording session of her life. By the time the band made Bloody Bride she knew exactly how hard the work was, and says she went in braced for it, pacing herself so that her stamina and her nerve would last to the end. HARU noticed the difference: the first time around NATSUMI turned up at the studio looking cheerfully oblivious, and the second time her face was set from day one.
Bloody Bride was made on a rule of not tidying the sound up too much. Modern metal can be assembled any number of ways, NATSUMI points out; on this record the band leaned harder than before on the sound of instruments actually being played, and editing was kept to a minimum. HARU's description is that they deliberately left it rough enough that you can tell human beings made it. The live show was in view from the writing stage — the point was that the record should be playable, as it stands, on a stage.