GALNERYUS Trivia — 25 Entries
25 sourced facts about GALNERYUS.
Trivia
GALNERYUS formed around guitarist SYU and worked its way outward from a base in the Kansai region. The turning point was 2001, the year they met producer Yorimasa Hisatake. The following year came a debut single, "REBEL FLAG," on the IRON SHOCK label; and in 2003, with keyboard player YUHKI in place and the band properly assembled, they made their major-label debut on VAP with the album The Flag of Punishment.
The band's work abroad opened up from the mid-2010s. Their first European tour, in July 2014, drew two thousand people across three countries — Germany, France and Spain. November 2016 brought the Unbreakable tour, which included a date in Mexico, and in 2019 they played the American festival ProgPower USA.
The tenth album, Under the Force of Courage (2015), was begun under a stated concept: the first suite-form album in the band's history. Ultimate Sacrifice, two years later, continued it — a second suite, set in the world that follows the first.
YAMA-B, the band's first singer, left in 2008. With their next move under scrutiny, Masatoshi Ono appeared as a guest vocalist at an event in May 2009, and his formal recruitment followed. The first major stage for the new line-up was Loud Park 09, the metal festival held at Makuhari Messe on 17 and 18 October that year.
The dragon on the sleeves has come to mark something for the band. SYU's account is that GALNERYUS's musical identity settled once dragons started appearing on the covers: through the era of first singer YAMA-B they had kept experimenting, but from Resurrection, the first with a dragon, the direction has not wavered. Which is why the twentieth-anniversary album, The Stars Will Light the Way, had to have one too.
How the band spent 2013, their tenth year on a major label, was a plan drawn up the previous winter. As SYU describes it, the idea was simply to do twice the usual year: two albums and two tours. The first half brought The Ironhearted Flag Vol. 1: Regeneration Side, self-covers of material from before the current line-up, and a tour; the second half brought Vol. 2: Reformation Side, remakes of older songs, and another. In October they played Shibuya Kokaido for the first time, and sold it out.
The second of the two, the remake album, turned out to be harder than writing new material. SYU had assumed it would be straightforward — take what they had done before and do it better with the current line-up. In practice the original versions exerted a pull he could not get clear of. Keeping the backing largely intact while changing vocal melodies and lyrics made it harder still, and it fell heavily on Masatoshi Ono to deliver. He stands behind the finished record, but as for doing it again: he would rather not.
The two concept albums were built the other way round from usual. SYU's normal method is to accumulate fragments of ideas as voice memos on his phone, stitch them into songs and assemble an album out of those. For the concept records he began with the title, then listed — loosely was fine — what kind of atmosphere and what kind of scene each song needed to supply. He found it a very efficient way to work. The making of them was another matter: YUHKI calls it genuinely gruelling, and SYU doubts he could do it again if asked. Both regard the pair as records they can be proud of, and for YUHKI they were a considerable boost in confidence.
From 2014 onward the drum stool changed hands twice. Jun-ichi, the original drummer, left in 2016 for personal reasons; relations stayed good enough that he still comes to see them when they play Osaka. FUMIYA held the seat from 2016 to 2020 — a player SYU already knew well from studio work — and he too ended up having to leave for reasons of his own. SYU is plain that none of this was wanted: he would have preferred to keep the same five people indefinitely.
SYU found LEA, the band's current drummer, on YouTube. He rates him as having everything his predecessors had — Jun-ichi's steadiness and FUMIYA's snap. LEA had been a GALNERYUS fan who spent years learning their material, and had turned up as a punter at an Okinawa show for mobile-site members, where he got an autograph from Masatoshi Ono that he posted years later on X. SYU notes that LEA was barely ten when the band started, and that with fans from the early days now married with children who have become fans themselves, the thing has turned into a large family.
Union Gives Strength (2021) and Between Dread and Valor (2023) were issued not as full albums but as what the band called special albums. Not being able to sit in a room together and build a full record during the pandemic was part of it, but only part. SYU's reasoning was that if what they were feeling was what everyone in the world was feeling, there was a point in putting it on record — so he set out to convey that state of mind deliberately through darker songs. Plenty of other artists, he assumes, went the other way and wrote bright ones; his band simply said it straight.
The twentieth-anniversary album, The Stars Will Light the Way, was written on the premise that everything on it could be played live, start to finish. Before this, SYU says, the band had spent years overreaching: on Phoenix Rising and Angel of Salvation they would attempt something difficult, record it, and work out how to play it later. This time each part was written imagining how that particular member actually plays. Writing between tour dates pushed it the same way, and the record came out unusually direct and catchy as a result.
The title The Stars Will Light the Way was settled after the record was finished. "I Believe," late in the running order, had struck SYU as the album's important song, and a line in its lyric gave him the phrase. His first version was The Stars Will Light Our Way — the stars lighting the path they themselves should take. That felt a little self-regarding, so "our" became "the": after the pandemic, the point was to light everyone's way and not only their own.
On The Stars Will Light the Way, not one of SYU's songs uses an odd time signature. All of that, he says, is concentrated in YUHKI's "In Water's Gaze." YUHKI's own account: asked for two songs, he decided one would be his idea of a killer track and the other something SYU would never write — wide enough to broaden the album without sticking out of it. His non-negotiables were that it be built in three or in ten, and fast enough for an audience to move to. It ended up long, but he considers it a song he can enjoy alongside the crowd.
"Crying for You," on The Stars Will Light the Way, came out of YUHKI and Masatoshi Ono losing their mothers at around the same time. YUHKI wrote the music, and the two of them wrote the words together — YUHKI setting down gratitude and contrition toward a parent, Ono writing from his own feelings. YUHKI describes it plainly as a ballad for their mothers. Ono notes that although it comes from grief, it ends on forward-looking lines. They wrote it as a pair on the judgement that, personal as it is, much of it would apply to whoever was listening.
Asked about the keys he sings GALNERYUS in, Masatoshi Ono answers: F. Sharing a bill with ANTHEM once, he let out a high note during the mic check, and Yukio Morikawa asked whether he could still reach B or C. Told that he was in fact singing in F, Morikawa's reply amounted to sympathy. Ono adds that while the running and jumping has got harder, twenty or thirty songs back to back no longer leave him hoarse by the end.
SYU is explicit about the bar he holds the band to. There are a great many metal bands, and only a handful play the metal he actually rates — so if he is going to do it himself, he wants to make the metal he wants to hear. Technical playing, a clean high vocal, melodic songs with real structure, an album that flows, a world of its own. Being a band whose records land with that jolt every time, he says, requires an enormous effort every time.
The first record made with Masatoshi Ono and bassist TAKA in the band was the sixth album, Resurrection, in 2010. One of its songs, "A Far-Off Distance," was used as the closing theme for the Nippon TV anime Rainbow: Nisha Rokubō no Shichinin. The final night of the supporting tour, at Shibuya AX, was released as the live DVD Live in the Moment of the Resurrection.
For a metal band, GALNERYUS have taken on an unusual number of tie-ins. The July 2012 single "Hunting for Your Dream" was the closing theme for the Nippon TV anime Hunter × Hunter; "Attitude to Life," released as a single in December 2014, closed the same network's Donten ni Warau. In 2012 they also put out a mini album led by "Kizuna," written as the theme for a pachinko title based on Sōten no Ken.
The eighth album, Angel of Salvation, peaked at number nine on Oricon's daily chart — a placing the band's own history page describes as among the strongest by any heavy metal band in recent years.
In 2017 GALNERYUS moved to Warner Music Japan, and Ultimate Sacrifice, released that September, was their first record for the label — fourteen years on from their major-label debut for VAP.
Masatoshi Ono arrived with a million-seller already behind him: "You're the only…," released in 1992, and a high register that had earned him the tag of a miraculous voice. The change brought a singer with an established chart record into a band known for its playing.
The vocal fake Masatoshi Ono throws into the big call-and-response at the end of "Crying for You" was improvised on the spot. He had said it was not his strong suit; SYU's verdict is that it came out excellently anyway. Ono's own comment is that nobody in GALNERYUS had ever told him to sing that freely before — most of his parts are worked out in advance. YUHKI reads the growing number of unfixed passages as a sign of trust: they no longer need to spell things out.
Masatoshi Ono leans on translation sites when he writes in English. Their accuracy varies, though, and when he starts doubting whether a line is really right he takes it to an AI instead. One answer he got back: grammatically fine, but "go to hell" is a very strong thing to say, so be careful where you put it.
SYU writes off a running stockpile. Whatever he absorbs — not only from music — occasionally produces an idea, which goes straight onto his phone. Somewhere in that accumulation, he says, a melody always turns up that makes him think he has it; and once he has, he reckons he can live off it for the next year. Since he only ever works on things he is certain about, whatever he finishes is something he is confident in from the outset — which is why he can call every record his best. YUHKI puts it similarly: melody is what matters most in a GALNERYUS song, and if that is right, the writer has won.