Music

Billboard JAPAN‘s “MONTHLY FEATURE” series presents various artists and works that have caught its eye. This month’s featured artist is Omoinotake, a three-person band that recently released their second major label album, Pieces.

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In January 2024, they released “Ikuokukonen,” which they wrote as the theme song for the TV series Eye Love You, which aired on TBS on Tuesdays. “Ikuokukonen” reached 2nd place in Billboard JAPAN‘s “JAPAN Hot 100” song chart. It became one of the big songs of 2024, staying in the charts and taking 3rd place for the whole year in the annual chart released in December. The band steadily expanded the scale of its activities, leading to its first appearance on NHK’s Kohaku Uta Gassen at the end of the year. Omoinotake had long vowed to create a hit song and perform in the Kohaku Uta Gassen, so 2024 was a tremendous year for the band—the year in which it achieved both of these dreams.

Their latest album, Pieces, contains 10 songs, including some previously released singles like “Ikuokukonen” and “Tsubomi,” the ending theme to the seventh season of the TV anime My Hero Academia. We talked to the three members of the band about this richly varied album full of songs that will make listeners want to dance and will bring tears to their eyes.

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Your goal in the past was to perform in the Kohaku Uta Gassen. What was it like actually standing on the Kohaku stage?

Leo Fujii (vocals and keyboard): We’d always talked about how we wanted to become a fixture in the Kohaku Uta Gassen, so it really meant a lot to us. I don’t usually get nervous during shows or TV appearances, but I have to say, I was super nervous during Kohaku. Having appeared on the show, my resolve to keep appearing year after year has only gotten stronger.

Before going on stage, did you talk to each other about what kind of performance to put on?

Fujii: The song we performed, “Ikuokukonen,” has a straightforward message, so we didn’t talk in particular about how to convey that message. We just wanted to do the song justice.

Tomoaki Fukushima (bass): I was so glad that this stage, which we’d longed to play on for so long, turned out to be such an excellent place. Taking that first step was a hard one, but it felt like I’d finally started moving forward with my life.

You achieved huge success in 2024, including the release of a hit song with “Ikuokukonen” and your appearance in the Kohaku Uta Gassen. How would you sum up the year?

Fujii: I’d say “whirlwind.” That’s really the only word for it. There was always this mountain of things that we needed to do in front of us, but personally, I was really glad about that. For a long time, the past 12 years, we’ve always had to take the initiative to get things going. We were able to maintain a high level of motivation through all of 2024, so it was a whirlwind year for us.

When did you start working on your latest album, Pieces?

Fujii: In around October.

Fukushima: Right. We’d first started talking about making a new album back in summer, though. We began by deciding on the album. Our basic concept was that, as a band, we can’t do anything if even one of us is missing. It’s when we each bring our own strengths together that we truly become Omoinotake, this solid, unified presence. That was really palpable in 2024, which is why we started out by deciding on the title Pieces.

So it’s an expression of the nature of the band.

Fukushima: There’s a lot of variation in the songs on the album, so we also looked at each of them as pieces. No matter what, we wanted to create a “Pieces” title track, and if possible we wanted to base the other songs on the album on the title, as well.

Fujii: We’ve focused on making songs you can dance to and songs you can cry to, so once we decided on the title Pieces, we wanted to make an album of songs to dance or cry to.

Hironoshin Tomita (drums): As one of the members of the band, I found the creation process really satisfying—I feel like I did everything I could in the making of the album. Everything from sound production to performing. When Leo made the demo, he left some space to work with. He was like “go ahead and do what you want with this.” I’m very satisfied with the riffs I wrote and how I performed them.

I know it may be hard to choose, but if you had to pick a song that you felt especially satisfied with, which would you pick?

Tomita: The part of “P.S.” before the second chorus.

You picked a really pinpoint spot (laughs). Did you start out planning for this to be the first song on the album?

Fujii: Yes, but we didn’t finish the lyrics until the very end. But, yes, we wrote it to be the first song.

How is it structured?

Fujii: We wanted to try something we’d never done before. We looked around a lot and came across this jungle beat, and were like, “Let’s try this.” Usually, jungle would have bass and synths and be more like dance music, but we didn’t want to do straight jungle. Instead Emoaki (Fukushima) played the root notes with a pick, rock-style, so we made it into Omoinotake’s own style of jungle. Then we were like, we should also mix in some pop-punk, which we’ve always been big fans of, so the last chorus has a pop-punk beat. It’s a really playful song.

The use of pop-punk in the song is really interesting.

Fujii: I was listening to Thundercat, and one of his songs had a kind of pop-punk beat. It really opened my eyes seeing someone who wasn’t from the pop-punk scene using this kind of rhythm in his music.

How did you write the lyrics?

Fukushima: We’d finished writing the title track, “Pieces,” and we wanted to write lyrics that connected to it, while at the same time conveying the concept of the album to follow. We wanted the song to be an introduction to the album, but just serve as a pointer of the direction it would take. Then that theme would really resonate with the last song, “Pieces.”

Of all the songs on the album, do you think ‘Pieces’ is the most tied to that theme?

Fukushima: I think so. For “Pieces,” we decided to start by writing the lyrics. We already had a few singles lined up, and we’d already decided on the album’s title, but we knew that we needed to write a song that expressed where the band is now to close off the album. I think we succeeded in making a song that conveys the message of the album’s title.

Fujii: Actually, “Pieces” is the only song on the album that we wrote the lyrics for before writing the music. A few of the songs are tie-ups, but when we wrote the lyrics, we wrote them based on aspects that we and the tie-ups had in common. “Pieces” was different, though. Emoaki wrote the lyrics focusing purely on us, just writing about the band. We wanted to really treat the song right, and since the song is about us, we wanted to directly communicate our message. So we wanted to take great care when writing the lyrics, and then set them to music.

Tomita: When Emoaki sent me the lyrics, I thought they were wonderful. And then when Leo added the melody and completed the song, I was impressed again by how difficult it must be to divide up the roles of writing lyrics and writing music between two people. That balance felt like a testament to our band’s history.

You started out as junior high school classmates, and you’ve been together for over a decade. Do you plan to keep this same style of having different people handle the lyrics and the music?

Fujii: Yes, I think that’s the best approach for Omoinotake. For example, at the start of “Pieces,” there’s a line that goes “In this ash-colored town/I saw a black-and-white dream.” Those expressions, “ash-colored town” and “black-and-white dream,” have this shared meaning, so just by looking at the lyrics, you can be like “well, then, the melody’s got to be like this.” I think this vision for the music based on the lyrics comes from the fact that we have this shared history.

I’d like to talk a little about “Better Half (feat. JEONGHAN of SEVENTEEN) -Japanese ver.” I’ve heard that this collaboration came about because JEONGHAN’s team reached out to you. What did you think when they contacted you?

Fukushima: It was totally out of the blue. We were like, “You mean, that SEVENTEEN?” But the timing was really important for JEONGHAN, so we were overjoyed.

What back-and-forth was there between you about the song itself?

Fukushima: At first, I wrote it as more of an emotional, Omoinotake-like song. They got back to us asking for it to have a brighter feel. I was like “Wow, I’m really a downer, huh” (laughs). But we wrote a song with a really strong protagonist, which is pretty rare for an Omoinotake song, so that was very new for us.

Fujii: JEONGHAN sings with a really sweet voice, which made me feel like I could try a new approach in the way I sing, too. There’s some interplay in the bridge, and I’m very happy with the song, because I was able to create a melody that wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for this collaboration. We also thought about JEONGHAN’s voice a lot during the sound production. The finished song has a mellow feel. We also went with a dry drum sound, creating a good balance.

Tomita: Like Leo said, the overall atmosphere of the song is soft, but the drums are kind of crisp. It’s the kind of song that you can’t afford to underestimate. The simplicity of the song is the reason we were able to perform so tightly. For a drummer, it required a surprisingly stoic approach.

JEONGHAN released his own version of the song, “Better Half (feat. Omoinotake),” in Korean.

Fujii: That’s right. I sang on it in Korean, too. I don’t know the first thing about Korean, so I got pronunciation training to sing it.

I hope the song will further grow your listener base. The last time we interviewed you, you said that your goal for 2024 was to get into the top 10 in the hit charts. Right after that interview, you broke into the top 10 of the “JAPAN Hot 100” song chart. What is your take on the business side of music, like hit charts and sales?

Fujii: We’ve only released one hit song so far, so there are a lot of people who know our song but don’t know Omoinotake. That’s frustrating. I’m confident that we’re writing lots of good songs, but they’re just not reaching listeners. So we still have this powerful desire to create a lot of hits and have people listen to a lot of our music.

—This interview by Takuto Ueda first appeared on Billboard JAPAN