HAGANE Trivia — 26 Entries
26 sourced facts about HAGANE.
Trivia
HAGANE supplied both the opening and the ending theme for the game CRAZY CHA!N -Elpis no Kusari-, and Sakura wrote the words, the music and the arrangements for both on her own. The opening, "Amour Chain," is French for chain of love; the ending, "Avenir," means future. By Sakura's account "Amour Chain" was built around the heroine — a seventeenth-generation Joan of Arc — as a forceful, unruly woman, while "Avenir" was written from a man's point of view, looking at that same heroine. Because the story carried the idea of fighting, she steered the ending away from an outright love song and toward the warmth of daybreak. She has also written that when it was finished she was startled it had come out of HAGANE at all.
Sakura — Sakura Yoshida — who founded HAGANE, started playing guitar at seven. By middle school she was posting covers of Western rock to YouTube, and after finishing high school she took guitar appearances and support work while recruiting members, getting HAGANE moving in 2018.
HAGANE began with guitarist Sakura working her way through a musician-wanted site called OURSOUNDS, contacting players one at a time and booking studio sessions with each of them. She refused to settle, and the search dragged: from the point she started looking, around her final year of high school, to the day the first vocalist was finally in place, roughly two to three years went by. Her stated first criterion was not musicianship but visual presence, followed by compatible personalities and a narrow age range — a generation gap, she reasoned, would leave everyone walking on eggshells.
Three members left HAGANE at once after the one-man show ZERO on 26 May 2023, leaving only guitarist Sakura and bassist Sayaka. The open call for a new vocalist that followed set a specific audition piece: "BlackCult," from the previous year's first full-length Code ; 9021. Applicants filmed themselves singing it and sent the video to a dedicated address; those who cleared the paper round were invited to a studio session in Tokyo for the practical stage. The posting asked for women roughly in their teens to twenties, resident in Japan.
On TOP OF THE TOWER, the song "Kagome" quotes the melody of the Japanese children's song "Kagome Kagome." Sakura has said she checked in advance that the melody was clear from a copyright standpoint before building it in. The lyrics are by Sayaka, who was handed a one-line brief by Sakura: a hell-festival for the kenshi — kenshi, meaning swordsmen, being what HAGANE call their fans. Sayaka mapped the inescapable wheel of reincarnation onto the cage in the old song, and wrote the words around a single conclusion: the only way out of the cage is to burn it.
Every track on the EP METAL QUEST was mixed by a different engineer. The songs pull in different directions — LA metal on one, British metal on another, a fusion of metal and Japanese traditional music on a third — so Sakura picked a separate mixer for each, chosen for what that person would bring out. "Gekko -TSUKIKAGE-," the track built on traditional instruments, went to an engineer on the strength of their work mixing Wagakki Band.
HAGANE played abroad as a band for the first time in April 2026, at Epic Fest 2026 in Denmark. Individual members had worked overseas before, but never the band. The four have said, in more or less the same words, that they still cannot work out how people in countries they had never visited came to know them.
The single "Amour Chain" was written to order as the theme song for the Nintendo Switch title CRAZY CHA!N -Elpis no Kusari-. It was the first time Sakura had composed against a story that already existed. In the production meetings she was the one who raised the idea of alternate versions, and when the game's director took to them, an orchestral version ended up on the release as well. Nagi has said the offer arrived close to two years before the interview, in the middle of the first Tokyo–Nagoya–Osaka tour the current four-piece played together.
Sakura gave the origin of the band's name in a 2020 interview. Steel is a metal that grows stronger the more it is struck and worked, the interviewer suggested — and by that measure the band was starting to live up to what it was called. Sakura agreed, and added that becoming exactly that was the thought behind choosing the name in the first place. In the same conversation Uyu, the vocalist at the time, mentioned that the band call their fans kenshi, meaning swordsmen.
The engineer who mixed the first single, Labradorite, was someone Sakura tracked down herself. She searched Twitter for the person behind the music of BLAZBLUE, a game she liked, made contact from there, and talked them into taking the job. The result, by her account, was exactly the sound she had wanted. The release itself was funded through crowdfunding.
The closing track of the first full-length Code ; 9021, "ZERO," was written around the anime Code Geass: Lelouch of the Re;surrection, and the title comes from a code name used by one of its characters. Not everyone in the band knew this: the origin came out for the first time during an interview. Guitarist Mayto was surprised to learn it referred to a person at all, and Uyu, who sang it, said she had taken the lyric at face value as a song about war and had pictured herself fighting with a sword while recording it.
By Sakura's account the title Code ; 9021 carries two readings at once. One is chronological: the record spans older music from around the nineties through to the newer music of 2021, when work on it began, so that time advances as the album plays. The other is vertical. The sleeve was designed around the deep sea, and she wanted the title to suggest something like a depth of 9,000 metres. The starting point was "BlackCult," written on a deep-sea concept, and the running order sinks further from the ninth track, the instrumental "Undersea Paranolia," onward.
The search for a new vocalist dragged. Studio sessions with one candidate after another produced no one decisive, and before the band knew it, it was December 2023. The application window was extended, and it was only after hearing about the extension that Nagi applied. She was twenty-two at the time. Auditions for female vocalists commonly cap out at twenty-two, and she had reached the point of deciding that one more rejection meant looking for a regular job. Her teacher, asked twice, told her both times that it did not sound like a fit.
HAGANE call their fans kenshi — swordsmen — and the word runs straight through into the fan club itself. Its full name is HAGANE Official Fanclub -Kenshi no Quest-, and the items sent to members carry names in the same register, such as the "kenshi photo card."
On 23 April 2024 the official site posted "HAGANE: new members decided," unveiling the four-piece with vocalist Nagi and drummer JUNNA in place. The comeback show announced the same day — HAGANE reboot live -Life goes on!-, at Shibuya REX on 27 June — sold out, and so did the extra date added at Yokohama ReNY beta on 16 July. On both announcement pages a single line was appended after the fact: THANK YOU SOLD OUT!!
The DVD bundled with the limited first pressing of TOP OF THE TOWER holds two films alongside its two music videos. One is "Looking back talk time," a round-table in which the members go back over the preceding year. The other is "Reboot of HAGANE ~from 2023 to the future~," a documentary that traces the rebuilding of the band from 2023, the year three members left, using off-shot footage among other material.
Both records the reformed line-up has released went to the top of the streaming charts. The 2024 EP Life Goes On! and the 2025 full-length TOP OF THE TOWER each reached number one on the iTunes metal top albums chart and on the Apple Music metal top albums chart.
The members who left after ZERO did not stay quiet for long. Vocalist UYU and guitarist Mayto. launched a new band, Mana Diagram, in October 2023, put out a first music video for "Glitter wind" that December, and played their debut show at Shindaita DOORS on the 22nd of the same month.
For a band named after steel, HAGANE went a surprisingly long time without a song that leaned openly on Japanese traditional colour. Sakura has said she was aware of the gap and had been sitting on ideas, and that "Tenka Goken," on the 2024 EP Life Goes On!, was the first of them to actually get made. "Kagome" followed on the next album, and by the 2026 EP the thread had grown into "Gekko -TSUKIKAGE-," which brings in traditional instruments and a spoken passage. Sakura has said she wants to keep adding to this side of the band, with the eventual aim of staging an event built around it.
Both tracks released ahead of the METAL QUEST EP reached number one on the iTunes metal top songs chart. They are "Black Diamond," aimed squarely at eighties LA metal, and "We are The Knight," which leans British.
In October 2024 Sakura appeared as a guitarist in a Suntory Craft Boss commercial, the "Alien Jones Idol" instalment of the long-running series featuring Tommy Lee Jones, Koji Yakusho, Ryunosuke Kamiki and Yumi Kawai.
The tour final at Zepp Shinjuku on 25 December 2025 was the biggest show HAGANE had played, and it sold out. The venue was JUNNA's doing: a year earlier, in the meeting where the final date was being decided, she spoke up — loudly, by her own account, for the first time in such a meeting — and said this was where she wanted it. From the stage that night Sayaka put the crowd at over a thousand.
Nagi, who joined in 2024, had almost no connection to metal before that. During the years she was failing audition after audition, her father and sister — listening to her sing at home — reportedly could not work out which genre that voice was actually for; the news that she had joined HAGANE is what finally made it click for them. Since joining she has deliberately avoided listening to metal. She studies vocal technique from footage of the J-pop singers she already loved, on the reasoning that sounding unlike other metal vocalists is precisely what she can give the band.
Sakura sometimes writes from anime and manga. The Japanese lyric of "BlackCult," on Code ; 9021, took its cue from D.Gray-man, a series she likes. "FlyingCircus," the English-language song on the same album, rests on a fictional sport from Ao no Kanata no Four Rhythm, which she was watching at the time; she has said the words came out of simply wanting to fly. The interviewer grouped these together as her "unauthorised anime songs," and Sakura agreed that was about right.
Sayaka, who wrote the words to "Kagome," studied philosophy at university, and has said this was finally the song where that came to use. Singing it was another matter. Nagi took a long time to get to the bottom of the lyric and had Sayaka walk her through it in detail; at the actual vocal session both Sayaka and the agency's president stepped in to direct, and what they arrived at was a way of singing that is not metal at all.
The instrumental "Over the fate," on TOP OF THE TOWER, dates from the stretch when Sakura and Sayaka were the only two who could appear in public; the pair had played it together perhaps twice. Sayaka has said the title's sense of going beyond fate is bound up with that period, and that precisely because this was the album of the new line-up, she wanted it on there. Even so, by the time the record was finished the four of them had never once played it live together.