HANABIE. Trivia — 17 Entries
17 sourced facts about HANABIE..
Trivia
In 2026 HANABIE. supplied "Inochi Mijikashi Taisuru Otome yo," the opening theme of the TV anime Tai-ari deshita: Ojousama wa Kakutou Game Nante Shinai, which is set in a girls’ school. In a comment issued through their label the band noted that they too came out of a girls’ school and formed while still at high school, and that they found a lot to recognise in the story’s picture of throwing yourself into something. Yukina and Matsuri wrote the words and music; Matsuri and LASTorder arranged it.
The band's name comes from when its members were born. As Metal Hammer reported it, Yukina was born in spring and the others in winter, and the name puts those two together: hana, meaning flower, and bie, meaning cold. Hanabie is the Japanese word for the snap of cold weather that returns while the cherry blossom is out.
Yukina and Matsuri had been in the same class in junior high, but Matsuri was in a sports club and Yukina in the art club, and beyond saying hello they never really talked. Yukina caught wind that Matsuri was into bands, had it confirmed by the band towel Matsuri used at sports day, and went up to her in the corridor at high school that everyone called the South Corridor. Matsuri has said she felt at the time that this was not going to be a one-off conversation. Yukina then invited her to look round the light music club — having already found out that Matsuri had played guitar since she was small. Yukina describes the whole thing as premeditated.
HANABIE. came out of a school light music club, and started as a Maximum The Hormone covers band. Producer Gaku Taura has said the school was a girls' school, and Matsuri recalls that playing loud music there made them stick out badly within the club. At school shows nobody stood at the front. Yukina set about pushing the genre on everyone regardless, and by their final year it had become something the club simply knew about. Matsuri was the club's president at the time, and theirs was the only band at the school playing actual venues.
The producer of HANABIE.'s first nationally distributed release, Kaika Sengen, was Gaku Taura, known from Crystal Lake among others. He first saw them between autumn and winter of 2017, at Nihon Danji, an event his own project SOUL JAPAN ran to find young bands. The three were still at school. What drew him was that they were a women's loud band that had not gone the idol route, building everything themselves, and he approached them on the spot. Later, working with Matsuri on some game music, the subject of recording came up; Taura pushed to have it done at his own place, telling them he was certain that within two or three years they would make something together worth what it cost.
"Osaki ni Shitsurei Shimasu" takes its title straight from a phrase embedded in Japanese working life. Matsuri explained to Metal Hammer that it is what you say to excuse yourself from a work drinking session, in a company or in the music industry alike — a convenient, distinctly Japanese way of leaving without giving offence — and that the band wanted to turn that phrase, and the culture around it, into something witty. The video ends a day of being told to make tea and do the photocopying, then expected out drinking at night, with Yukina taking her boss by the neck and screaming into his face. There is shamisen on the track.
In June 2024 HANABIE. opened the Opus stage at Download Festival in the UK. It was only their second British show; the first had been a sold-out, sweat-soaked night at the Underworld in Camden the previous August. The day before Download they had played Nova Rock in Austria, and they told Metal Hammer they had stood in front of some 20,000 people there, among the largest crowds they had faced. Matsuri said that every Japanese person knows about Download.
Harajuku-core, the tag HANABIE. carry, is not an existing genre but a term the band coined themselves. As Metal Hammer put it, they were alluding to the variety and self-expression associated with Tokyo's Harajuku district, and the word covers a sound in which glittering hyperpop electronics, hardcore punk and groove metal all run together.
HANABIE. was formed in 2015 by Yukina, Matsuri and Hettsu, classmates who met in their high school's light music club. All three were born in 1999 — Yukina and Matsuri in Tokyo, Hettsu in Saitama. Drummer Chika joined in May 2023 to make the current four-piece, and the band made its major-label debut that July. The genre they claim for themselves, Harajuku-core, is described as metalcore and hardcore taken somewhere else.
Sony Music's official profile introduces the members not through a career summary but as short bullet lists. Yukina writes lyrics and is billed as the screamer; Matsuri is the band's leader, handles words, music and arrangement, and is the one who does the deadpan comebacks; Hettsu gets "fashion monster," "heavy drinker," "a schedule built around meals" and "brightly dyed hair for life"; Chika gets "insatiable for ice cream" and "secretly the tough one."
To mark ten years, Rittor Music published the band’s first artist book on 25 August 2025. Across 128 A4 pages it carries long interviews with each of the four, a look at their gear, a costume feature — and, alongside those, a recipe from each member and full band scores. The made-to-order edition came as the SPECIAL ARTIST BOOK HANABIE. NATSUYASUMI BOX, bundled with a folding fan the members designed and a separate photo book.
Haru no Daikaihousai, the event HANABIE. put on themselves, is described by their label as something they have held since the band began. Live footage of "Osaki ni Shitsurei Shimasu" from the 2024 edition, staged that May, was released in November of the same year.
Kaika Sengen holds six songs, but when work began there were only about five, some of them dating back to the band's school days. The closing track, Drastic Nadeshiko, was the one built from nothing with Gaku Taura. "Envy" and "ZERO," by contrast, were largely finished already, and Taura left their structures more or less alone — partly because they were good as they were, partly because he felt a first record could stand to be a little unfinished.
Chika's arrival on drums was announced at the band's own event at Machida CLASSIX on 27 May 2023, in the moment before the encore. A short film played on the venue screen, and then Chika — who had been playing that night as a support drummer — came back onstage in a new outfit, and it was announced that she was joining for good.
The sleeve of the major-label debut Reborn Superstar! was drawn by the illustrator PONKO. Ahead of its release, in July 2023, the band announced a Tanabata stunt called "Find the Runaway Orihime." From the evening of 7 July, members would be hiding somewhere in Tokyo, and whoever tracked them down would get an item of merchandise not sold anywhere, first come first served.
As a high-school student Yukina wrote the band's goals down in a notebook: to share a bill with Maximum The Hormone, to play a lot of Japanese festivals, and to become the queen of Japan's loud rock scene. The Hormone show came about in later years, and dates alongside admired seniors such as SiM and coldrain grew more frequent. Yukina's own reading of it is roughly that writing them down was what did it.
"Spicy Queen," released on 28 May 2025 to mark ten years since the band formed, was not written with the anniversary in mind. Matsuri has said it grew out of the American tour they had just done in March and April, written while thinking back to their earliest impulses and to the years when going abroad was out of reach — and that only afterwards did someone point out how well it suited the tenth anniversary.