Zilqy Trivia — 10 Entries
10 sourced facts about Zilqy.
Trivia
The spelling "Zilqy" was never meant to be the band's name. It began life as an abbreviation. Vocalist Anna built the name outward from Queen, wanting something that suggested a woman, then went looking for a word to put in front of it. Her first idea was Zero, for nothing at all, but it did not sound like much; the slang term zilch did. The plan, then, was a band called Zilch Queen that could be shortened to Zilqy in passing. Somewhere in the conversation they realised they preferred the short form, and the abbreviation was promoted to the real name. Music Natalie's profile glosses the combination as a queen who belongs to no one.
Before there were four of them, there was a single session at a live house in Okinawa. Toki and Miho had known each other for years without ever having shared a stage. Toki, who cares as much about how a player carries herself in front of an audience as about what she plays, found herself watching Miho instead of concentrating on her own part — and decided that if she was going to build a band capable of working abroad, this was the person to build it with. She made the offer. Miho, who says she had long admired Toki in return, accepted, and that exchange is where Zilqy begins.
The name went through at least one casualty on the way. Anna spent a good while championing "Tokyo Astro Babies" — long enough that Miho later teased her about how hard she had pushed it. It did not survive, and not because of how it sounded. Neither Toki nor Kano is from Tokyo, and that settled it.
Early on, Toki and Miho were hunting for a second guitarist. Both had absorbed the idea that a metal band comes with twin guitars. What changed their minds was the music itself: as the sound came into focus, one guitar began to look like the better answer, and the arrival of Anna and Kano — who both prefer a single-guitar lineup — settled the question. Miho has pointed to what she had been noticing at festivals in Europe and the US, where fewer bands bother with a wall of amps and fewer still put two guitarists face to face for the solo.
Kano reached the band through a manipulator Miho had met at a music-industry drinking party, who told her there was someone she ought to go and see. Miho went, watched Kano play, and came away certain she did not want anyone else behind the kit. Toki set out to do the same — and picked a night when a substitute drummer was filling in. She worked this out while she was already on her way to the venue.
"Carry On," the lead track on the EP, was chosen by ballot. Members and staff each brought a melody to the table, everyone shut their eyes, and hands went up for whichever one they liked best — blind, so that nobody was voting for a person. This was the one that won. It was also the first song the band finished, and it kept moving afterwards: Kano joined partway through the process, and her drum parts pushed it somewhere else again. Miho has said that making this single track was how the four of them worked out what each of the others actually wanted the band to be.
Vacant Throne is an English-language record with two exceptions: "Cannonball" and "Realize" each break into Japanese. Those lines did not arrive uncontested. The idea came out of a band conversation about "Cannonball" in particular, whose chorus melody struck them as Japanese enough to carry Japanese words. Anna has described being told on the day of the session that the lyrics should stay in English — and holding her ground until they did not.
The band's first show, "Start The Fire," took place on 10 December 2025 at SPACE ODD in Daikanyama, Tokyo, and sold out immediately. Two of the ten songs in the roughly hour-long set were covers, for the plain reason that a five-track EP does not fill a set. One was Paramore's "Hallelujah" — a song from Anna's own roots, and the first cover Zilqy ever put together. The other was Metallica's "Enter Sandman," also her pick. For the encore they returned to "Carry On," with Anna hushing the room and starting it a cappella.
Anna spent the debut show leaning out over the riser to work the crowd, switching between a low, side-on delivery and a wide-open upper register — the bearing of a frontwoman with plenty of stage time behind her. She had not stood on a live stage since 2017. Her return after eight years away happened to be her band's first concert.
Vacant Throne was not finished by the four members alone. Miho names Toshi-Fj, Kuboty of ex-TOTALFAT, Macky, and Crystal Lake's Gaku among those who worked on it, describing a team that argued its way through the material together. Anna has said that "Disguise," the track that took longest to come together, was built up from a foundation laid in the studio with Toshi and an engineer.