KOIAI Trivia — 11 Entries
11 sourced facts about KOIAI.
Trivia
KOIAI exists because of a cover video. Li-sa-X had known Polyphia for years — she had even opened for them on a Japanese tour — and the three of them, Kotono, Hazuki and Li-sa-X, liked the sweetness of the lyrics to "ABC" enough to try covering it as an experiment. It was the middle of the pandemic and they could not get into a room together, so each filmed her part separately and the footage was assembled remotely. The band treats what came out of it as the record of where everything began: making it is what settled the decision to become a band at all.
The first big stage KOIAI stood on was not in Japan. In February 2023, with no official recording to their name, they were invited to the Oddball Festival in India and played three cities on a bill that included The Aristocrats and Bloodywood. The self-released debut EP Deep Indigo did not arrive until three months later, on May 1, and even then only by mail order through the band's own web shop. The offers from abroad came before the records did.
For Mirei Sakurada the call from KOIAI was the last chance. She had done nothing but sing since she was small and had been turned down at audition after audition; she was working out what to do next when the band got in touch. She decided she was going to be KOIAI's vocalist, and that was that. People tell her she does not look like someone who gets nervous. The night before her first show with the band, she cried.
Starting Over began with Li-sa-X unable to write. The shock of losing a member was still there, no clear picture of what the band now was had formed, and she describes the stretch plainly as a slump. So the first two songs, "Starting Over" and "Reboot the Abyss," were written by the producer, with Li-sa-X, Hazuki and Kanade Sato putting their own stamp on them through the arrangements instead. Yunika Impact joined the writing from the third track, "Once in a lifetime," and the closing pair, "Hoax" and "Meant to be," are Li-sa-X's own — finished, by her account, right up against the deadline.
The three of them met through radio. Kotono's former band IRONBUNNY hosted a programme, and both Li-sa-X and NEMOPHILA — the band Hazuki plays guitar in — had appeared on it, which is how they first came to know one another. Then Li-sa-X BAND lost its vocalist at almost exactly the moment IRONBUNNY broke up. With both footings gone at once, the conversation turned to trying something together, and KOIAI followed.
Two sleeping incidents came out of the India trip. Hazuki was rooming with Kotono, who at one point sat bolt upright in bed, folded to a perfect right angle, then dropped back down and carried on sleeping — with no memory of any of it afterwards. The other involved drummer Kanade Sato, who fell asleep with the room locked from the inside, leaving her room-mate Li-sa-X shut out. The whole band had a go at waking her. None of it worked.
Hazuki's first thought on meeting Li-sa-X was that this was what a prodigy actually looked like. She has been alongside her ever since — from Li-sa-X's first solo show, through Li-sa-X BAND, and into KOIAI. Hazuki calls her something like a younger sister, though in her own column she admits what she feels is sometimes closer to a mother's protectiveness. Two lead guitarists in one band, and by both their accounts, not a trace of rivalry in it.
Mirei Sakurada came in through an audition. The band still had shows on the books after their previous vocalist left, so something had to be settled quickly. Other singers were put forward, Hazuki says, but the moment they met Sakurada the decision was unanimous. Settling a vocalist settles a band's direction, and by her account the months that followed — the writing included — went smoothly from there.
The bass solo on "Hoax" was an unusual brief for Yunika Impact. She is known for slap, and what was asked of her here was smooth and composed — a request she says she almost never gets. She thought hard about how to play it, and what came out was a bass part unlike anything she had done before. Li-sa-X had a starting point for the idea: an earlier conversation in which the two of them found they both loved Dirty Loops.
The five of them did not arrive from the same place musically. Hazuki likes loud music; Kanade Sato has played fusion since she was a child; Yunika Impact leans fusion too, on the grounds that it comes with plenty of slap. And Mirei Sakurada says that until she joined KOIAI she had never really listened to band music at all. What she had been listening to was R&B, K-pop and Hikaru Utada.
KOIAI played all three days of Heavy Kawaii Fes 2026, held at the Meijiza theatre in Tokyo from July 31 to August 2, with a different act opposite them each day. Their job there was not only to play their own set: they also served as the backing band for the groups they were sharing the bill with, which Li-sa-X describes as a new experiment for them.