Music

Four-piece band yutori made their major label debut in April 2025 with “Speed,” the ending theme to the TV anime My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, following it with a mini-album, Hertzmetre. Buzz has been building ever since, and now they’ve dropped a new song, “Hide And Seek With The Moon,” the ending theme of Season 2 of the TV anime WITCH WATCH. This song, whose music and lyrics were written by Kotoko Sato (vocals and guitar), follows a different trajectory than “Speed” and yutori’s previous work, adding new nuances. Sato’s vocals are a perfect fit for the simple, polished sound of the song, and you can feel her warmth come through. 

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Billboard JAPAN spoke to the four members of the band about the changes they’ve experienced in their own feelings and thoughts as a result of their major label debut and about the process that culminated in this new song, which explores a new direction.

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You released your major label debut song, “Speed,” in April. That song gained traction in ways that your previous songs hadn’t, and it created opportunities for new listeners to discover your music. What kind of effects has this new attention had on you?

Ren Urayama (drums): We have a lot of fans that are different than the fans we had before. “Speed” was the ending theme to an anime, so there are a lot of fans, including overseas fans, who found us through that. The response was better than anything we’d experienced before. It also felt really new. I was like “So this is what it feels like to get bigger by joining a big label.”

Taichi Toyoda (bass): We’re on a solo tour right now, and we’ve got people from Korea, the UK, China, Taiwan, and all kinds of countries coming to our shows. I’m not sure if that’s because of the anime, but when I see it, it really makes me realize how many new listeners we’re reaching.

Ikuya Uchida (guitar): But what we’re doing, and what we want to do, that hasn’t changed. It just feels like we’re reaching more people. I think the reason that we’re working with more staff members and other people is so that they can help bring us to audiences that we wouldn’t be able to reach all on our own. I feel like we now have access to a wider range of expressive possibilities than we used to, and I’m always grateful for that. But if we start changing our message, I feel like that would shake the core of who we are. So, personally, I don’t think I’ve changed at all. I just want to keep sharing what I’ve always shared, in the same way as always.

So that’s the context in which you released your new song, “Hide And Seek With The Moon.” It shows a totally different side of you than “Speed.”

Sato: Yes, like the exact opposite (laughs).

Urayama: Kotoko wrote the music and the lyrics to the new song, and I wrote the music and lyrics for “Speed,” so you can really see, in a fascinating way, the differences in men’s and women’s perspectives. “Speed” is not the kind of song that Kotoko could ever write, and I never could have written “Hide And Seek With The Moon.” But that’s what makes them so interesting.

Kotoko, you’ve written a lot of different songs. Did any of them feel particularly new to you?

Sato: Hmm…Let me think… A lot of the songs I’ve written, both love songs and non-love songs, have this feeling of unhappiness or dejection. Compared to them, “Hide And Seek With The Moon” has a happy vibe.

Yes, that made the song feel really fresh. Going off of first impressions alone is never a good idea, but I feel like in the past your songs have tended to be on the darker side.

Sato: They have, haven’t they (laughs).

It’s not like the song is super sunny, but I feel like it has this sense of warmth to it. I’m intrigued about the timing of releasing a song like this. It’s the ending theme to WITCH WATCH. How did you come around to writing it?

Sato: I was just sitting on the balcony, spacing out, and there was this utility pole and a full moon. As the moon slowly moved behind the utility pole, it became hidden, and I thought “it’s like the moon is playing hide-and-seek,” and that’s what I was thinking about when I wrote the song. I was hoping that would fit in with WITCH WATCH, so I read the comic, and I matched what I was feeling to the feeling of the comic.

What did the rest of you think of it at first?

Urayama: Even among Kotoko’s songs, I felt like she was taking a bit of a different approach than usual. In our past songs, there’s been a lot of development of the musical phrases. A kind of intensity within the quiet. But this song was—I don’t know if happy is the right word, but it has a warmth to it. So I didn’t want the drums to be too dense, and I kept them simple on purpose. When played live, this is the kind of song you can wave your hands in the air to, and it also has the kind of strength that you can just immerse yourself fully into.

Toyoda: For me, this song is really “the world of Kotoko Sato.” Kotoko’s highly influenced by pop music. Aren’t you, Kotoko? Artists like Yuming.

Sato: Right.

Toyoda: So it was like that aspect suddenly came out. I felt like as part of our growth process, it was absolutely essential that we write a song that puts that pop music feel front and center, so I’m glad we wrote this song.

What do you mean by “the world of Kotoko Sato?”

Sato: I don’t know (laughs).

Toyoda: You may not know exactly what it means, but you can feel it in the song.

Urayama: I feel like it goes along with a sense of loneliness, but in a totally different direction than in previous songs. Both of them sing a lot about “weakness,” but this song is looking up at the moon. Personally, I don’t look at the sky when I write music. When I write, I like to keep my eyes cast down, or looking straight ahead. But Kotoko tends to like looking up. That really stands out in this song.

Sato: You have a point there. When we’re writing music, when Ren goes outside, he looks down and doesn’t say anything. I’m the type who will look for any little space where I can see the sky and try to find the moon. That’s one of the differences between us.

I’m sure the “world of Kotoko Sato” that Toyoda mentioned has always been part of your music, but it feels like with this song that’s been put into the form of a song in a more direct way than before.

Toyoda: I think that even with songs that Kotoko wrote lyrics for in the past, there was some holding back to make the song feel more like a yutori song. With this song, I think she brought out quite a bit of her world.

Urayama: The fact that she could convey that through lyrics showed a lot of growth, and also as the members of the band have gotten older, the way we look at things and the way we feel has probably also changed. I really felt that in the lyrics.

“Hide And Seek With The Moon” became more of a pop song as a result of this change in perspective, right? You also mentioned Yuming and kayōkyoku (Japanese pop music standards). I understand those are parts of Kotoko’s musical roots, and I feel like this song has some of that vibe.

Urayama: I really liked how that kayokyoku feel came through not just in the lyrics but also in the melody.

Sato: Yeah, when we were working on the song, I was thinking, “yeah, this is nice, it has that same feel.” That kind of music was a big influence on the song, I think.

Uchida: I held back on the guitar for this one. When we’ve written our songs in the past, a lot of it was about giving them the yutori feel, and I wanted to step away from that a bit. Instead of trying to fit it into our own style, I approached it with the intent to make it a complete, independent song. It felt like the chords were really responsible for setting the stage backdrop, and I think I helped support that.

Yeah, the arrangement and the sound production concept is totally different than your past songs.

Urayama: Right. We wanted to send out this song with all four of our instruments and the vocals as a single unified package, as a single song.

Uchida: If you think of “Speed” as being made through addition, then this song was made through subtraction. We tried not to pack it too densely with information, instead leaving the whole “information payload” up to the singing.

So you freed yourself from the need to make the lyrics or the sound go along with the yutori image and style, and instead produced a song that was more straight-forward and unvarnished than ever before? I’d imagine that’s what made the creation so difficult.

Urayama: I think you’re right. It was hard, but the biggest accomplishment is that the four of us did it all on our own, without bringing in any music arrangers. Of course, we’ll reach out (to outside parties) for some songs, and we love doing that because it provides a nice touch to our songs, but this time we felt things out and arranged the song entirely on our own. I think that will be a great asset going forward. The song was really a learning experience for us.

You’re also taking on quite an ambitious challenge by releasing this as your second major label single.

Sato: We’ve been together five years, and we’ve made our major label debut, but we can’t always just always fall back on that “yutori feel.” I want us to constantly challenge ourselves, to try to make songs with a different mood than what we’ve put out before.

Urayama: When you make a song like this, it gets you out of that rut of just making the same kinds of songs. While you’re working on the song, you start coming up with all these new ideas, like “maybe we should use this kind of arrangement, which would work really well.” You try new things precisely because you don’t know exactly what comes next.

Sato: Sometimes you try something out, and you’re like “No, that’s not right,” and then you go back and repeat the process. During that process of trial and error, you discover new things that are great fits.

And, in the end, it does feel like a yutori song. But the process involved in creating it is completely different than the process you used for your previous songs. In other words, I don’t think that “yutori feel” just consists of driving guitars, or the sounds of the bass and guitar and drums all blasting at the same time, or really emotional vocals.

Urayama: Right. I feel like we’ve discovered a new aspect of what it means to be yutori. We’re reaffirmed that whenever yutori plays, that’s yutori.

Uchida: In “Speed” and our earlier songs, it felt like “Kotoko Sato inside that yutori feeling,” but with this song, it’s more like “that yutori feeling inside Kotoko Sato.” I think the concept is different. That’s the interpretation that clicks the most with me—the song brought out the yutori feel in Kotoko.

Now that you mention it, there was kind of a feeling with your past songs—and I’m sure it’ll be there in some of your future songs, too—like you were armored up.

Sato: Yeah, in the past. It was really thick armor, too, to protect ourselves. But now we’ve taken all that armor off, cast it aside. Until now, yutori’s approach has been “I’m weak, so I’m going to go on the offense.” This time, it’s more like “I’m weak, so I’m going to run,” or “I’m going to hide.” It feels like we’ve taken a heavy load off.

I think another important part of that dynamic is that there’s also a “you” there—another person who accepts all of you, even the weakness.

Urayama: Yeah. Even when we take off all our armor, we’re not alone. I think it’s always been true, but no yutori song is completed by just one person. There’s always a “you,” too. Sure, we may be vulnerable without our armor, but “you’re” always there. I think that comes across throughout our new song, both in the lyrics and in the music.

—This interview by Tomohiro Ogawa first appeared on Billboard Japan