A band is an unpredictable congregation of many lives. Kurayamisaka deeply understand that. Though the five-piece are quickly ascending as one of Japanese indie’s buzziest names – enigmatically fanning genre debates online, electrifying Fuji Rock stages, and sharing bills with generation-defining names in just a miraculously short three-year span – things were not necessarily meant to be this way. After all, Kurayamisaka began in the ashes of a former life.
Their story began in university when vocalist Sachi Naito, initially a J-pop-inspired songwriter, formed a group with guitarists Ryuji Fukuda and Shotaro Shimizu. “It was just the impulse of youth,” Naito recalls of their original motivations, speaking to NME over Zoom from Japan. Inevitably, however, adulthood and working life brought the band to a halt.
But the band’s memory lingered within Shimizu. Eventually, after a decade playing around Tokyo’s venues – admittedly “at 150 per cent capacity” – he decided it was possible to try again. Believing himself capable of “bringing out Naito’s potential”, he reached out once more, this time appointing himself songwriter. After enlisting bassist Asami Rinpei from Yokohama emo outfit Yubiori and drummer Yousuke Hotta online, news eventually spread to Fukuda, who quickly rejoined as third guitarist. “It felt like fate,” he recalls.
Armed with a grand three-guitar attack, the band soon found a different edge. On their first single, 2022’s ‘Farewell’, and subsequent EP ‘Kimi Wo Omotteiru’ (‘I Am Thinking Of You’) – written from the perspective of two girls soon to be separated by graduation – Naito’s ephemeral voice introduced the band’s melancholic alt-rock, coloured by dark, poetic atmospheres and a penchant for guitar feedback and noise.
At times majestic (‘Cinema Paradiso’), and at others moody and urgent (‘Curtain Call’), Kurayamisaka’s ghostly melodies and gargantuan walls of sound quickly drew buzz domestically and abroad. Off the back of the distortion-drenched EP, listeners online began labelling them as a shoegaze act, while their initially cryptic image – biographically anonymous, with illustrated cover art – generated its own fantasies online.
Shimizu recalls the speculation that first swirled on social media: “They would say, ‘Oh, this was definitely a long-lost band from the ’90s! The members all seem already dead!’ Or, ‘Oh, this must be AI!’” The mystery was, at least at first, intentional: Shimizu originally intended the band as a side project, assuming other endeavours would keep their members busy. “It felt very much like a prank we were playing,” Naito notes. Ever the crowd-pleasers, however, the band couldn’t help but let the secret out, excited for reactions to the eventual reveal. Soon, as they played their first shows, Kurayamisaka unveiled themselves on stage.
Live, the shoegaze assumptions began to feel rather unfounded. More At The Drive-In than Astrobrite, the band’s energetic sets are decidedly not subdued: at any moment, they’re violently swinging their guitars and euphorically punching the air, while Naito’s vocals, clinical and distant on record, turn expressive live, confidently soaring through brutal fuzz.
The performances proved pivotal for Kurayamisaka, allowing them to fully embrace something more integral to their DNA: the driving, punkish energy of Japanese indie rock’s 2000s heyday. In particular, the band were students of the spiky melodicism and cathartic, distortion-blazed spirit of bands like Toddle, Bloodthirsty Butchers and Number Girl – a generation of influential acts helmed by guitarist Hisako Tabuchi.
While their first EP hinted at this lineage, their new full-length, ‘Kurayamisaka Yori Ai Wo Komete’ (‘From Kurayamisaka With Love’), foregrounds it with a bang: a headrush of blistering guitars, hard-hitting rhythms and yearning hooks. An upfront noise pop gem, the record’s propulsive palette backdrops Shimizu’s sincere reflections on sorrow, loss, and death. Fuzz-pop power chords aside (‘Sunday Driver’), the album’s ambitious scale also pushed Shimizu to pull on strands across the Japanese underground: Envy’s hardcore intensity informed the crushing title-track opener, while the adrenaline-inducing, Marshall-stack fueled ‘Metro’ pays tribute to scene predecessors I Have A Hurt.
Beyond Japanese influences, the band’s search for massive tones also pushed them to look outward. Together with engineer Tomoro Shimada (“a guitar nerd”, per Shimizu), they took notes from American approaches – from Momma to fellow triple-guitar band Hotline TNT – to more experimental frontiers. British band Caroline’s extreme digital distortion and innovative use of feedback on ‘Total Euphoria’ also blew them away.
“If they could make music like that, then we had to bring it too,” Shimizu exclaims. Trying to find that blown-out bliss themselves, Kurayamisaka plugged their guitars directly into consoles, layering sounds and taking cues from The Beatles’ ‘Revolution’. “We thought that we couldn’t get to that with just normal recording methods. We put in a lot of work, thinking of how to aim for the limits – sounds that feel like they barely make it.”
‘…Ai Wo Komete’ was intended as an omnibus of stories reflecting on life from multiple viewpoints. In some ways, Kurayamisaka are similar: always reinforcing, reincarnating, reinventing their past and present. The melancholic, Naito-penned highlight ‘Highway’, for example, dates back eight years to the band’s embryonic days. Originally an ode to escapism, her voice, informed by accumulated years, transforms the song with self-recognition – even haunting resignation.
“We put in a lot of work, thinking of how to aim for the limits – sounds that feel like they barely make it” – Shotaro Shimizu
Meanwhile, the band’s experiments culminate emotionally on ‘Anata Ga Umareta Hi Ni’ (‘The Day You Were First Born’). Accustomed to approaching lyrics via imaginary situations, Shimizu chose instead to draw from personal circumstance: above a barrage of D-beats and feedback, Naito adopts the perspective of Shimizu’s recently deceased parents, turning everyday observations into a message of gratitude for life.
Eventually, her voice disintegrates in a blaze of glitched-out textures and incendiary distortion. “I wanted it to resemble a carousel of your life flashing by before you die – in a way where you couldn’t tell apart dreams or reality,” Shimizu says of the treatment, inspired by the finale of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
The band’s studious and poetic approach attracted a similarly cultish response, one which turned Kurayamisaka into a polarising subject within Japan’s indie circles. Upon the album’s September release, some hailed them as alt-rock saviours, heaping on acclaim. Others, suspecting the shoegaze label as an ignorant response to the band’s generous use of distortion, dismissed the band as derivative in relation to the genre’s rich domestic history: some turned overzealous praise into online copypasta, while other compatriots within Japan’s indie underground snarked at the genre debate altogether.
“I barely know anything about shoegaze at all,” Shimizu admits. While he embraces whatever labels listeners throw at them, the virality and debate are still on his mind. Asked about other cult bands that also found breakthroughs online, Shimizu is more sincere than self-absorbed. “Panchiko probably wanted to sell more when they first began, and Parannoul, of course, began with anonymity – but I’m sure they didn’t end up wanting to be received as a meme,” he says. “I’m sure they formed because they were determined to put out something that was even better.”
Today, Shimizu believes that Kurayamisaka’s sensibilities are, in fact, shared by devoted fans around the world, regardless of language or country.
“Even in Japan, we’re still very much considered an underground band,” Shimizu says. “But I’m sure that at the back of a classroom, there’s always going to be one secret person who loves us. I’m sure it’s those people who came to find out about us.” Now that broader horizons suddenly seem possible, the NME 100 alumni are also finding kindred musical spirits across Asia, seeing similar sensibilities in South Korean artist Crystal Tea and Taiwan’s Touming Magazine. In June 2026, they will play in Taiwan, marking their first overseas performance.
Regardless of scale, Kurayamisaka are fixated on a simple goal: presenting the magic of seeing a band together in their element. “We want to express and take on those pure emotions,” Naito concludes. When asked about their favourite thing about their band, Shimizu is similarly straightforward.
“My favourite part about myself is that I’m a man of many moods,” Shimizu says flatly. “And my favourite part about Kurayamisaka: when we play loud together, it’s really, really loud.”
Kurayamisaka’s ‘Kurayamisaka Yori Ai Wo Komete’ is out now via Tomoran/Bandwagon/Chikamatsu