NEMOPHILA Trivia — 25 Entries
25 sourced facts about NEMOPHILA.
Trivia
NEMOPHILA did not start out as a band. In the summer of 2019 the five began as a session project and played two shows in that form. The rehearsals felt as good as the gigs, and as they came to know each other the wish to keep going took hold; after the second show the conversation turned to picking a name. The moment NEMOPHILA was settled on, mayu says, was the moment the five of them locked into place. The band dates its start from August 2019, and its debut was in September as an opening act at METAL WEEKEND 2019 at Zepp DiverCity, on a bill that included LOUDNESS and HAMMERFALL.
NEMOPHILA go by a nickname that translates roughly as "the fluffy band from hell." Their official profile states the formula outright — the sound is as violent as hell and everything else is soft — and mayu explains it the same way: ferocious music, easy-going people. The instrumentation backs it up: screaming vocals, a seven-string guitar, a five-string bass and a double-kick drum kit.
The band's YouTube channel went up on 8 February 2020, and the first thing posted to it was a cover of IRON MAIDEN's "The Trooper." Less than six months after they started, the pandemic wiped out most of what they had planned; mayu's account is that the channel and streamed shows were how they kept working. The covers turned out to have a side effect. Playing other people's material showed them which genres each of them was strong in and how each of them approached things — it was, she writes, a good way to get to know one another.
The rooms grew quickly. On 17 July 2023 the band played Tokyo Garden Theater as NEMOPHILA 4th Anniversary -Rizing NEMO-; when it was confirmed, mayu wrote in her column that it had been one of the stages she looked up to and that she could hardly believe the day had come. That year also brought an eleven-date headline tour and festivals at home and abroad, and in February 2024 came their first show at Nippon Budokan.
NEMOPHILA began with singer mayu assembling people for the music she wanted to make. Her starting thought was that she wanted to play loud music, and that hardly any all-female bands were built around screaming — which meant there was something interesting to be done. The five who answered her calls became the band.
The first person mayu approached was drummer Tamu Murata. They had never met — mayu knew her only from videos and magazines — and she asked on the off chance, and got a yes. Guitarist Hazuki was brought in by SAKI, who had herself been introduced through an acquaintance. Bassist Haraguchi-san was already a friend of mayu's.
Guitarist Hazuki only took up the seven-string once NEMOPHILA started. The reasoning was about staying out of the singer's way: screaming occupies much the same range as guitar, so she decided to go below it. A twin-guitar band with one player permanently on seven strings is not a common shape, she notes, so it also gives the band a signature. What she had grown up listening to was bands full of death growls and screams — ARCH ENEMY, CHILDREN OF BODOM and the like.
Drummer Tamu Murata gave birth in May 2020. Her return was the audience-free streamed show on 22 August that year, billed as exactly that — Murata's comeback. It fell on the release date of the second single, "Raitei," and in her comment at the time she said she was fired up for a first show back from maternity leave and wanted people to see her come back stronger.
The main composer on the debut album REVIVE was Kensuke Akiyama, formerly of LAST MAY JAGUAR. The method was loose by design: the members threw out whatever they liked — this sort of sound, that sort of idea — and then Akiyama would turn up at the studio after rehearsals and they would talk through what he had brought and pick from it. SAKI has also explained that because every single up to then had been sold only through the band's own site, the plan for their first generally distributed album was to include all of the older material, which would have left room for about three new songs. That felt insufficient, and new songs were added as the sessions went on.
"HYPNOSIS" on REVIVE stands apart for its Middle Eastern flavour. Haraguchi-san wrote the music: she wanted something on the album of a kind NEMOPHILA had never done, and that particular atmosphere was one she had always liked. The lyric is Hazuki's, and rather than write anything conventional to fit the music she dropped an incantation into the middle of it. That incantation is mostly Arabic — except for one phrase, which has nothing to do with Arabic and is in fact praise for Haraguchi-san, who wrote the song.
In NEMOPHILA, members other than the singer sometimes sing. "Breaking Out" is drummer Tamu Murata's: the song is so full of screaming that someone had to carry the melody, and SAKI and mayu handed it to her. Singing while drumming forces her to work the rhythm out consciously, she says, which has turned out to be good training. "Blooming" goes to bassist Haraguchi-san, and the reason she can sing at all is odd. At eighteen or nineteen, in an earlier band, the vocalist abruptly left for America; the remaining members each tried singing, and by process of elimination the job fell to her.
The show at LINE CUBE SHIBUYA on 9 January 2022 was the band's first headline date with an audience present as a five-piece, and their first in a hall. Tickets sold out before general sale even opened. In an interview beforehand SAKI admitted she had thought management was being reckless putting their first hall show in Shibuya Kokaido, and had resigned herself to playing an embarrassingly empty room — the instant sell-out genuinely surprised her. The band had not yet released an album; what she took from it was that the people who had found them through YouTube and streamed shows over two years would actually turn up.
mayu registered her marriage on 7 July 2021 and announced her pregnancy during a live stream on 15 September 2022. The dates immediately after it went ahead regardless: a co-headline show with SHOW-YA on 29 September and an appearance at the American festival Aftershock on 7 October were both played as scheduled, on her own insistence and with a doctor's clearance. Her maternity leave, of roughly two months, began after that.
NEMOPHILA did not stop while mayu was away. The remaining four — SAKI, Hazuki, Haraguchi-san and Tamu Murata — billed themselves as NEMOPHILA quartette and played instrumental shows under the name NEMOPHILA Instrumental Night, the first of them at Shimokitazawa Shangri-La on 5 December 2022.
At the end of March 2024 guitarist SAKI left NEMOPHILA, and the band has been a four-piece since. In her statement on going independent she said that in NEMOPHILA she had thought of herself as the oldest member, whose role was to push the others towards their own challenges, and had spent the time sharpening her craft as a metal guitarist; from here she wanted to join whatever music interested her without restricting herself by genre. In 2023 she had also been picked as guitarist for Like-an-Angel, the L'Arc-en-Ciel covers band led by that band's tetsuya.
The first single, "OIRAN," came out on 29 February 2020, and the show at Shibuya REX that same day sold out instantly. The song has remained the band's calling card; it appears on the 2021 debut album REVIVE in a re-recorded version.
The debut album REVIVE topped the iTunes rock chart and reached number five on Oricon's weekly ranking.
The second single's title track, "Raitei," contains a guitar battle between SAKI and Hazuki running to nearly fifty seconds. Its B-side, "SORAI" — already part of the live set by then — is a shuffle whose lyrics take as their theme the autumn wind carried in the word sourai, built around riffs that exploit the low end of the seven-string guitar and five-string bass.
Every track on REVIVE, the earlier singles included, was mastered by Jens Bogren in Sweden. SAKI has pointed out that the prevailing method now is to tidy everything up with amp simulators and drum triggers, and that this record was deliberately left sounding real and played.
"Rollin'Rollin'" on REVIVE is SAKI's composition, written up-tempo and in major keys to be bright. Then Akiyama's arrangement put a conspicuous slap bass figure on the intro — nothing on a NEMOPHILA record had ever pushed the bass that far forward, and SAKI says it surprised her too. It landed on Haraguchi-san, who decided the only option was to go at it and open up something new in herself, and sent her take over with a message saying it was the limit of what she could do. SAKI's reaction on hearing it was that she had managed perfectly well.
Hazuki described REVIVE from the stage of a streamed show as the product of blood, sweat and tears. Asked about it, her explanation was concrete: during the sessions she spent about a week thinking of nothing but her own solo, rejecting take after take of her own, and the phrase simply came out.
mayu gave birth to a boy in November 2022 and reported in her column that both mother and child were well. She returned with TOUR 2023 "Seize the Fate," which opened on 8 January 2023 and was also the band's first headline tour. Starting the year fresh off maternity leave, she wrote, she intended to go at it properly.
On the second album Seize the Fate every member took a turn at writing, words and music alike. The title track's lyric is SAKI's, described on release as carrying the determination to move forward on one's own terms over a fast-moving melody. It went out to streaming on 7 October 2022, ahead of the album.
While she was in the band, SAKI was its leader. mayu devoted a column to her, describing someone with a strong sense of responsibility who watches the other members closely, praises a singer when something in her delivery changes, and will work through English pronunciation and phrasing with her. On one occasion, between rehearsals, SAKI gave her a lesson on the difference between "do" and "does." mayu also admits she leans on her heavily — if SAKI says it, it must be right.
In May 2025 NEMOPHILA played a headline show at the Hibiya Open-Air Concert Hall billed as a hell of a set in which they played everything — and they did, in the rain, at one point beating an oil drum with a metal bat. Footage from that night of their covers of Metallica's "Master of Puppets," Limp Bizkit's "Stuck" and Slipknot's "(Sic)" went up on their official YouTube channel in February 2026.