LOVEBITES Trivia — 24 Entries
24 sourced facts about LOVEBITES.
Trivia
The band's name comes from the HALESTORM song "Love Bites (So Do I)" — a fact stated plainly in the profile their label publishes. At Download Festival in the UK in 2019, asami joined HALESTORM on stage and sang it.
The band started as a pair. Bassist miho and drummer haruna had been the rhythm section of another band, and when it broke up they agreed to build an all-female metal band with more bite to it and set out to find players. The first position filled was the singer's, and what filled it was a demo tape an acquaintance of miho's played her — guide vocals recorded for a professional songwriter. Hearing that voice, miho and haruna reached the same conclusion on the spot and got in touch immediately. What miho was after was not an idol-adjacent band in frilly costumes but metal played by grown women, with the musicianship to stand up abroad.
asami had barely touched metal before she joined. Her roots are R&B and soul, and she made her living as a backing vocalist for artists such as UVERworld and VAMPS. What revived her wish to be a singer was living in the United States, where she happened to get the chance to sing the national anthem at a ballpark. So when the approach came, her reaction was disbelief that anyone wanted her for metal. miho simply put her in a studio and had her sing a few standards of the genre. One of them was JUDAS PRIEST's "Painkiller" — on first hearing she could not tell whether it counted as singing at all, but working out her own way into it turned out to be fun, and she decided to jump in.
Guitarist and keyboard player miyako met metal in front of a shelf of instruction books. She had studied classical piano from the age of three and only took up guitar seriously at university; sent out to buy a method book, she picked one whose title promised "hell," reasoning that anything calling itself that must be seriously hard. It turned out to be a metal method book. Because every exercise came with a note of the record it was lifted from, she started renting those albums from the metal section of her local TSUTAYA. Classical and metal, she found, have a great deal in common, and with an ear and a reading ability already built on piano, the minimum technique metal demanded took her about a year.
IRON MAIDEN sits at the band's starting point. Asked what she had in mind before making the first full-length, Awakening from Abyss, miho said she wanted a record nobody could weigh up as metal-or-anime-theme — one that only the words "heavy metal" would describe — and that LOVEBITES had begun with her own wish to play songs like IRON MAIDEN's. Reproducing 1980s metal wholesale would only sound dated, so the aim was old-school ingredients carried on a contemporary sense of beat. She also plays bass fingerstyle throughout the album, out of admiration for Steve Harris.
The debut release THE LOVEBITES EP came out on 24 May 2017 — through the international division of Victor Entertainment, an unusual home for a Japanese band. It was a strictly limited pressing of 3,000 copies, three of its four songs in English. Mixing was by Mikko Karmila and mastering by Mika Jussila, the Finnish engineers behind records by NIGHTWISH, CHILDREN OF BODOM, STRATOVARIUS and AMORPHIS. Arrangement and co-writing on some tracks came from Mao, formerly the keyboard player of LIGHT BRINGER.
LOVEBITES were named Best New Band at the 2018 Metal Hammer Golden Gods, the awards run by the British metal magazine. The same ceremony gave the headline Golden God award to Ozzy Osbourne, Best British Band to JUDAS PRIEST and Best International Band to ARCH ENEMY. The band felt the effect: miho puts the visibly larger crowds on their European tour later that year partly down to people who had found them through the award.
In August 2018 the band played Wacken Open Air in Germany. It had been a goal since they formed, but none of them expected it the year after their debut. Warned that a weak set there draws boos and flying bottles, they had told each other that three or four rows of onlookers would do. What they found was a stage with a ten-thousand capacity filled to the back; miho says that when the smoke laid down for the opening cleared and she could finally see the crowd, she nearly cried. Staff from Nuclear Blast were watching, and the show led on to a deal with the label's subsidiary Arising Empire.
In November 2019 the band went out as special guests on DRAGONFORCE's UK tour: eleven shows in thirteen days, with an hour's drive to the hotel after each one, a short sleep, then three hours to the next town. DRAGONFORCE built a jam section into their own set for midori and miyako, which turned into a guitar battle with Herman Li. miyako's first thought when invited was that DRAGONFORCE's audience might not want them up there; once she was on, she found the room treating it as a party and relaxed. At the final show Herman Li went on in a white dress. The idea had been Sam Totman's — he had wanted a white dress like the ones LOVEBITES wear, never found time to go looking for one, and ordered a set on Amazon for the whole band; only one arrived in time.
The title of the third album Electric Pentagram turns on the fact that a pentagram is also a charm of protection. asami says the word was made to carry both the unity of the five members and the idea that they are the ones protecting metal — grand-sounding, she admits, though what she really means is that they intend to keep doing exactly what they have been doing. miyako adds that people always predict a turn to pop before a new record, and that metal fans have nothing to fear however large the band gets. For asami the third album was the one that counted; the wish to make a record that would last pulled everyone into line without any discussion.
"Swan Song" on Electric Pentagram is built around miyako's classically flavoured piano, but the direction came from asami. She had spent some sixteen years doing classical ballet, and the moment she heard the demo the idea of taking it to Swan Lake arrived. The piano that closes the song pictures the swan dying. The large choir at the end is asami alone, stacked from the bottom of her range to the top, sung in a slightly operatic voice to suit the classical frame — the male parts included.
Writing in English was miho's decision at the moment the band formed, on the grounds that asami had studied abroad and could speak it. The May 2017 debut EP still carried one song in Japanese; the first full-length is entirely in English. asami writes the words, and the early going was awkward. Nobody had a firm sense of what English lyrics needed, so melodies came out shaped for Japanese, and packing English into them produced tongue-twisters. Over successive releases they settled on melodic shapes English sits on, and asami grew into it. Pronunciation had its own trap: consonants like "th" leak air, and singing them forcefully without the result turning Japanese-sounding was a struggle she says stayed with her.
The audition to replace miho was open regardless of nationality, gender or professional status, and drew just under 250 applicants, a good number from abroad. asami's reasoning was that they could have found a technically capable bassist through contacts, but technique was a given and what they needed was whatever lies beyond it — so they widened the net to people they had never met. Six reached the second round, where, she later admitted, the judging began the moment a candidate walked into the studio. The two finalists were opposite characters; what decided it was how far fami had come in the short gap between the second round and the final, plus the presence she carried. Members and staff were unanimous.
The fourth album Judgement Day was made in an unusual order, with the bass recorded last of all. The band kept writing through the hiatus that followed miho's departure in August 2021, and by the time the audition ran, everything but the bass was essentially in the can. Once chosen, fami had two or three weeks to lay down bass for ten songs. Many of those songs push the bass forward, and deliberately so: they were written in anticipation of whoever would join, and asami explains that the title track's intro and outro put bass out front precisely to announce a new LOVEBITES. Because only the demo bass lines existed when the drums were tracked, haruna says hearing fami's playing on the finished audio came as a shock — the songs sounded a level up.
On 18 February 2026 the band announced a deal with the Austrian metal label Napalm Records covering the whole world outside Asia, Japan included. Their fifth album OUTSTANDING POWER, released in Japan that same day, came out internationally through Napalm on 8 May, with a vinyl edition abroad that Japan did not get. The label's roster includes KK'S PRIEST, led by former JUDAS PRIEST guitarist K.K. Downing, along with ACCEPT, EXODUS, ALTER BRIDGE and DRAGONFORCE, whose UK tour they had joined back in 2019. In their statement the band said they were proud to join a roster running from new arrivals to legends.
On 29 March 2026 the band played Nippon Budokan for the first time, billed as LIVE AT BUDOKAN 2026. General tickets sold out, restricted-view seats were released and sold out too, and the hall filled to the rows closest to the ceiling. The show opened with "The Awakening," the instrumental that opens their 2017 debut Awakening from Abyss, the cloth draped over the tiered drum riser drawn up into the roof to reveal all five of them. Alongside the ¥9,500 general ticket the show carried a youth ticket at ¥3,900. haruna explains the thinking: heavy metal is a high fence for young listeners, and lowering the price to widen the entrance is, as she sees it, part of what a band in LOVEBITES' position is now for.
On the Oricon charts the band has climbed release by release. The 2017 debut full-length Awakening from Abyss reached number 18 overall, Electric Pentagram in 2020 became their first top-ten entry at number nine, and Judgement Day in 2023 came in at number five on the weekly chart. Live releases have done just as well: Five of a Kind: Live in Tokyo 2020 topped the Oricon music Blu-ray chart in 2020, and Knockin' at Heaven's Gate: Live in Tokyo 2023 entered at number one on both the weekly music DVD and the Blu-ray rankings.
miyako did not start out under that name. She joined as a support member in 2016 and became a full member in August 2017, taking the line-up to five, but she was billed as mi-ya until the second mini album BATTLE AGAINST DAMNATION in June 2018, from which point the credit reads miyako. Material from the band's debut introduces her as a guitarist who also played in 21g, the band of SIAM SHADE bassist NATCHIN.
"Liar," on the first full-length Awakening from Abyss, was not written for this band. It came from mi-ya's — now miyako's — previous group, arranged back then closer to metalcore. That band had broken up, but miho and asami liked the song, and rather than let something that good be forgotten without ever being played live again, she rebuilt it as metal. The melody, she says, is largely untouched.
The guitar sessions for Awakening from Abyss pushed midori into territory she had never touched. At the producer's suggestion she played bottleneck slide on "The Apocalypse"; with no grounding in the technique at all, she studied Derek Trucks on YouTube before the take. On the lead track "Shadowmaker" she brought in a guide solo and was told to double the number of notes in one section — she thought it impossible, then did exactly that, and that is the solo on the record. Both guitarists also note that, because listeners tend to study a CD closely on headphones, passages they would play legato on stage were picked in full for the recording.
"Burden Of Time" on Awakening from Abyss began from a wish for something in the vein of ACCEPT. miho wrote both words and music, aiming at a chorus an audience could sing back, and although she had prepared several sets of chorus lyrics, she and asami settled on keeping one and repeating it unchanged so people would remember it. Finishing the song as a co-write with Mao had a sting in it: the bass figure he brought in was, by her account, beyond what she could play — hard work on a song that was supposed to be hers. Since it is not a fast number, she notes, none of that difficulty is audible.
The first European tour, in November 2018, ran to six shows in four countries. Britain and Germany they had already seen; France and the Netherlands were unknown, and France worried them most. France turned out to be the loudest room of the tour — the crowd sang along to songs that had never been made into videos, leaving asami wanting to ask them how they knew. The punishing part was travel and sleep. The tour closed with three consecutive nights in three countries: six or seven hours between venues, hotels reached at one or two in the morning, and shared rooms, so baths and make-up removal ran in turns. Over those last three days, three or four hours' sleep counted as a good night.
For Judgement Day miyako wrote close to twenty demos including the ones that went nowhere — more than she had ever produced for a single record — and four of them made the album. The closing track, "Soldier Stands Solitarily," had been written during the sessions for the earlier mini album GLORY, GLORY, TO THE WORLD and left off it; the chorus melody was too good to throw away, so she kept it, rebuilt the verse and pre-chorus around it and re-arranged the whole thing. The opener, "We Are The Resurrection," grew out of a riff midori brought in, and two versions were tried — a thrash-leaning one at a raised tempo and a slower, power-metal reading. The faster one won.
fami was already known as a poster of bass cover videos before she joined. Still at high school in 2021 she crowdfunded and self-released an album called Sotsugyo Album, and what made her name was a bass cover of "Alien Alien" by the Vocaloid producer Nayutalien. She applied to the audition during a year in which she had paused her own YouTube activity, and says the timing felt like fate. Her solo EP Hakoniwa, due on 26 August 2026, includes "Slap Alien" — a song Nayutalien wrote for her after she asked for it.