Nico Touches the Walls Interview Translation

Source: Excite

“We don’t intentionally do the music we want for our lives, we do it intuitively.” (Furumura)

--I listened to this album, and I thought that it was an incredible peice of work where the band’s vigor and the depth of the music really shines through. When did you start work on it?

Mitsumura: We’ve been writing songs continually since around the time we concluded our Budoukan performance last year. We started talking about recording an album at the beginning of this year. We didn’t think about what kind of album, but instead we thought about which songs would be fun to play in a live. There were a lot of songs, and when it came time to add them to the album there were so many good ones that it was hard to pick.

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GK PV Play: Artsy-Fartsy Edition

Many music videos are released every month in Japan to promote the latest single or album coming out. Though we often talk about the music videos that accompany the music we review, some PVs slip through the cracks. This week we task our lovely writer with the difficult job of reviewing some of the recent vids to make their way all the way from Japan to our computer screens in the US.

JASMINE - ONE
Shimizu Shota - You & I
Tohoshinki - Why? (Keep Your Head Down)
NICO Touches The Walls - Diver
Alice Nine - Gemini
Written by Erin Grace

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NICO Touches the Walls "Sudden Death Game" Exclusive Interview Translation

Original: Excite
Translator: Erin Grace

--“Sudden Death Game” takes the bands edginess to a new level; it’s a new kind of song.  The riffs come to an end in a cool way.  How long have you been working on it?

Mitsumura: We actually came up with the intro in May or June of last year at the end of a retreat.  We were inspired by some drumming Tsushima did, and from there we gradually layered the guitar over it.  But we played around with just the intro for half a year. (laugh)  At first we weren’t even going to put it on a single, and we thought we’d just write it for fun, and thought up a lot of weird parts for the arrangement.

--And when did it come to its current form?

M: We came up with the hook around March or April of this year.  While at first it seemed like post-rock, we thought about creating it with a “human electronic” feeling, but the melody kept getting harder and harder.  So when we went to our retreat this year, I really felt that Black Sabbath was a boon to us.  We’d only listened to “Paranoid,” the second album, and I thought that we’d created a great song for sure.

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