LUMiRiSE Trivia — 18 Entries
18 sourced facts about LUMiRiSE.
Trivia
LUMiRiSE started as a four-piece in January 2023, though the players were not strangers. Guitarist Kumi has said that the three instrumentalists had already spent six or seven years together in another band before LUMiRiSE, and had each been through several bands before that.
The singer now fronting the band was not there at the start. According to the official biography, the original vocalist, L, left in February 2024; after a few months of preparation the band restarted in June 2024 with Kotomi. Her joining date was 22 June, and the show at 3STAR IMAIKE in Aichi on 22 June 2025 was booked as the first anniversary of it.
On 31 December 2025 the band announced on their official site that guitarist Kumi and bassist Oto would leave in June 2026. The stated reason was a divergence in how each of them saw the band's direction and their own intentions, arrived at after repeated discussions. The same notice said a show in June 2026 would serve both as a second anniversary and as their farewell.
On 10 July 2026 the band announced its new shape: NOHANA on bass, and Miyu Kikuchi as a permanent support guitarist rather than a full member. The restart was set for September 2026, with a headline show at SHIBUYA CYCLONE on 4 September announced at the same time. NOHANA was previously in Stereopony and Kikuchi in Pulplant.
"Reimei," the first new song from the reformed line-up, brought in an unusually large outside team. Released to streaming on 27 July 2026, it has lyrics by Kotomi, with Kayoko Kusano credited for the music, sound production, piano, vocal direction and backing vocals. BLACK ALBATROSS arranged it, Shota Horie played guitar, NOHANA bass, Kishida of Kishida Kyodan & The Akeboshi Rockets programmed the beats, and Ayato Shinozaki covered the remaining instruments. Ryota Gomi engineered the vocal sessions and Kohei Nakatani mixed.
When the first singer left, the band came close to ending. Bassist Oto says she hit rock bottom at that point, and that having got to where they are now she is glad she did not quit. Drummer MIZukI has said that when the three of them sat down to talk it over, they came right to the edge of breaking up. Guitarist Kumi describes her thinking at the time as a conviction that no singer existed who could deliver everything LUMiRiSE's songs required.
The new line-up's first move was to re-record the song they were known for. "SHOOTER" was cut again with Kotomi singing and released as a 2024 remaster — and, in her own blunt words, it went down badly. Some people took it warmly, but early on the comparisons with the previous version were hard to avoid. Her answer was to take it to the stage: knowing that performing live is where she is strongest, she spent a year daring people to come and see it for themselves. Over that same year the "SHOOTER" video passed a hundred thousand views.
The title of the first full-length, ≠encore., is a statement of intent. Kotomi's explanation is that the rest of their musical lives will be spent on LUMiRiSE and nothing else — one performance, no encore. Even the full stop at the end of the title is there deliberately, marking the decision to make this the last thing they do.
There is a reason ≠encore. covers so much ground. Songs come not only from Kumi and MIZukI but from several outside writers as well, and breadth was the intention from the start. What resulted runs from punk-leaning material through loud rock and metal to visual-kei and anime-song colour, and listeners come back with a different comparison every time. Kumi's concern was how to hold all of that in one record, and her working image was a weekly manga anthology — many different stories bound into a single issue.
The words to "Amaryllis" on ≠encore. are Kumi's, but the commission came from the band's first singer, who asked her for something messy and romantic. Kumi worked outward from the amaryllis to the red spider lily, and one passage — loving someone so much that, unable to convey it, you decide to kill them — is layered with imagery of blood, written, she says, in deliberately overwrought teenage terms. The lyric is also a loop: the English lines that open it connect back round to the final line.
"Kimi ga Ite" on ≠encore. was the first song written after Kotomi joined, and both words and music are hers. It deals plainly with meeting and parting — a message to the band's audience, she says, and at the same time to the people close to her. It occupies a particular place in the set, too: on the heavy songs Kotomi throws herself into the crowd, and on this one she does not. Someone in the audience once told her that everyone's face softens during it. Kumi's account is that the song was written on purpose, to show a side of a band whose image had been dominated by "SHOOTER."
In May 2025 the video for "SHOOTER" was shown on the large street screen outside TV Asahi's headquarters, running from 28 May for roughly two weeks at irregular times. The band's site announced a second piece of exposure in the same period: from 1 to 30 June, "SHOOTER" went into rotation on USEN's A52 channel, played at random points across the month.
One of the things that worried Kotomi when she joined was simple geography. The rest of the band were in Nagoya and she was in Osaka, and with everyone still barely acquainted she spent a long time wondering what she could actually contribute. By the time of the interview, she said, that anxiety was gone.
"RESOLVER," which opens ≠encore. proper after the short intro, starts on drums. MIZukI describes her part as dense and hard to play, and says that opening is one of the things to watch. Bassist Oto used slap on it for the first time. The guitar is in drop D, and working with the outside writer they landed on chord movement Kumi calls unusually stylish for them; she thinks the song may become the band's new calling card. The lyric is Kotomi's.
"Love Emotion" on ≠encore. was written by Kumi with MIZukI, words included. The vocal trade-offs in it came out of BanG Dream!, which Kumi watched a lot: it struck her that a girls' band looks better when everyone is singing. MIZukI says she knew the song was going to work from the moment Kumi's demo arrived.
During their first year in the new line-up one of the band's songs was used as a television ending theme — for TV Asahi's Kuronadaru, in May 2025. Kumi listed it alongside slots at large events and a co-headline show with a major-label act as the sort of thing that happened over those twelve months.
The headline show at Shimokitazawa Shangri-La on 5 July 2025 was the biggest the band had played. It closed the release tour for their first full-length, and speaking mid-tour Kumi described it as both their current goal and a point they had to treat as somewhere to pass through rather than arrive at.
Drummer MIZukI has decided that LUMiRiSE is the last band of her life. Reaching the point of releasing a first full-length and going out on tour moved her, and of the year in which audiences grew and the others leaned further into the band, she says this is what she had always wanted — that she is finally getting to be in the band she had in mind.