CYNTIA Trivia — 20 Entries
20 sourced facts about CYNTIA.
Trivia
The origin of the name sits as a single line at the foot of the band's official label profile: Cyntia is a coinage made from Cynthia and Tiara.
They played Tokyo Dome before they had a major-label record out. In January 2013 the band was picked to back KARA at the venue — YUI on guitar, AZU on bass, KANOKO on drums, AYANO on keyboards — and were introduced to fifty thousand people by name.
The band started on someone else's video shoot. YUI and the band's first drummer were both called in for a LIV MOON music video, where everyone else on set was a personality rather than a player — the two of them were the only ones who could actually play. Out of that came the idea of assembling an all-female band, and CYNTIA formed around YUI and KANOKO.
SAKI failed CYNTIA's vocal audition the first time. Rock was not something she had listened to deliberately — her habit was to work through the Oricon top twenty. She then took vocal training for the first time in her life, came across SHOW-YA, and decided that hard rock played by women was something worth doing. She auditioned again, and got in.
The song SAKI happened to sing at her CYNTIA audition was SHOW-YA's "Genkai Lovers." Once she was in, though, she was told that forcing herself toward SHOW-YA would cost her whatever was her own — so she stopped thinking about it and simply sang. Her position is that no genre comes with a rule about how you have to sing it.
In April 2015 KANOKO, the drummer and the band's leader, left — one of the two people the band had formed around. That October they moved to the label Village Again Association, and in December 2016 released Urban Night, their first album as a four-piece.
After the drummer left, the band went about four months without playing. In five years of activity, SAKI says, they had never played so little, and it was the hardest stretch she can remember. Finding a stand-in took time too: they wanted a woman behind the kit, but CYNTIA's material is difficult, and candidates were scarce. Once someone was in place the shows gradually resumed.
Across three headline shows in August, September and November 2015 the band played every song they had ever released. One of those days was two shows — one acoustic, one with the full band — and a good many songs had to be rearranged for the acoustic set. Then someone said they wanted to play new material as well. There was nowhere near enough time, SAKI says, and it came down to simply not sleeping. AZU's view is that playing them let the band look back over where it had been, and made clear what to do next.
Urban Night was made in a way the band had never worked before. Up to the drummer's departure CYNTIA had turned out an album a year and kept moving; when it came to deciding what to do next, nobody proposed a direction. So the three writers — YUI, AZU and AYANO — simply threw demos at each other until something they wanted to do emerged. AYANO's framing is that Woman had gone after femininity and Limit Break after the band's heaviness, and that this record came from somewhere else entirely.
On 26 December 2017 CYNTIA announced an indefinite hiatus, and with it the fact that guitarist YUI had developed focal dystonia around eighteen months earlier. She had gone on performing since the onset, but symptoms had begun appearing in daily life as well; the decision was made so that she could concentrate on treatment, and because the others felt continuing without her was not possible. In her comment YUI wrote that she would work at it so the period would pass and become something to laugh about. SAKI wrote that she could neither think nor imagine a CYNTIA without YUI's guitar lines — that the band exists because of her.
Seven years into the hiatus, CYNTIA returned to a stage for one night. On 29 November 2024 they shared a bill with Aldious at CLUB CITTA' in Kanagawa, billed as Queen of the Night — a one-off reunion. The two bands had once been labelmates. Aldious played that night in a special configuration of their own, with former members Re:NO and Aruto as guests. In her comment SAKI wrote how glad she was to share a stage again with a band whose back she had always been chasing.
The bass chair changed almost as soon as the band started. AIRI, the original bassist, stepped back and then left for health reasons, and AZU — previously of LAZYgunsBRISKY — became a full member in November 2012. By Ongaku Natalie's account the change came immediately after the band's first show.
The band's independent-era numbers are recorded on their label profile. A demo tape got them signed to the indie label Spinning, and the resulting single "Run to the Future" reached 28 on Oricon's daily singles chart; the first album, Endless World, released in September 2012, reached 22 on the daily album chart. A run of shows across three consecutive months at GROUND in Omotesando, Tokyo, sold out.
Their independent period closed with a win: first place in the Best New Artist category of the readers' poll run by the music magazine Player.
Away from the band, SAKI sang the national anthem solo at the Orix Buffaloes' final home game of the season at the Osaka Dome.
The major-label debut came on 20 March 2013, with the album Lady Made on Victor Entertainment — two months after backing KARA at Tokyo Dome.
"Senkou Strings," a single released in January 2014, was used as the opening theme for the television anime Saint Seiya Omega.
The members' tastes barely overlapped. AYANO leans to progressive metal — DREAM THEATER and the like — and got into music through MARILYN MANSON in the first place. YUI's ground was Japanese metal, AZU's was 1970s rock, and SAKI knew Japanese pop; after joining she was, in her own words, put through a rock education by the others and borrowing CDs like a schoolgirl again. What drew AYANO to the band was its stated concept: heavy rock you can actually sing.
For bassist AZU that empty stretch turned into something useful. While they were still looking for a drummer she found herself playing sessions with a range of people, and came away thinking she could not carry on as she was. It gave her a chance to reconsider both her playing and how she thought about music — the first time, she says, she had actually stopped to think. She and natsume, the stand-in drummer, talked properly, and the two of them started going into the studio as a rhythm section on their own.
SHOW-YA, the band that got SAKI into rock in the first place, also turned up in her working life. CYNTIA played NAON no YAON — the festival SHOW-YA stage each year at the Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall — in 2013, 2014 and 2016. The first time, SAKI says, the occasion swallowed her; the second time she compensated by watching everything around her and ended up reading the room too carefully. The third, in 2016, was the best set they had played there.