Their warring “Song of Rebellion”

GARNiDELiA’s newest single REBEL FLAG was released on 13th March 2019. It currently serves as the ending theme song for the TV anime Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka. This is the fourth of 7 parts we will be covering in this interview from Natalie.

The “Odochattemita” branding we don’t want to lose

The first coupling track PASSION is a dance number with a very up tempo shuffle beat.

M: This is actually a tie-up song too. We were tasked to make a theme song for the mobile game Miko Note and they asked if we could make a song “in the same vein as the odochattemita series”.

Judging from that cutesy game title, I couldn’t imagine how it’ll sound. It feels like lyrics coming from an aggressive lady.

M: I thought really hard about this. The main character of this game is a Miko, and it is mostly just daily life, nonchalant scenes inside. I could have gone for something closer to that world-view, but one of the theme of the “odochattemita series” is having a strong female image. Because of that we decided to stick to that and we didn’t want to lose our branding.

I see.

M: For Miko Note there are very Japanese keywords such as pledge(契り) and impurity (穢れ) at its core. We picked those keywords up and I thought of a love song as an idea and that’s how PASSION came up.
T: Regardless of the melody or lyrics, did we keep it consistent to the themes of the game?

M: If you have already played the game, and read those keywords, you’d probably find it hard to disagree to them (the keywords).

Is it the same process as other songs under the “odochattemita series” such as Hysteric Bullet and Kureha Itoshiuta?

M: Precisely. Hysteric Bullet was the theme song for the Chinese web anime Gun Girls, and one of the key themes of this is Guns. We use that as a base to create the song. For Kureha Itoshiuta, it was actually the theme song for one of the characters in Arena of Valor. We thought of “maple leaf” and “being separate from your lover” as the themes. So actually, we are kind of use to creating lyrics like that. And especially for games, we use rough themes and ideas and created lyrics based off of these.

T: It’s actually hard to balance these rough themes with songs that I wrote before hand and fitting them together. For this song in particular, I thought of doing a “Japanese Marilyn Manson” style. A three piece consisting of a Japanese melody, mixing in some Rock taste and a touch of EDM inside. And we arranged it until it sounded like the final product.

M: We really think a lot! And it feels like a battle with ourselves even. (laughs) However, as toku said it was a triple feature which we haven’t done before, and I thought of a sexy image to help push the song. So I’m very glad we made the music first.


You can check out previous chapters of the interview here:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7


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