Music Natalie - Major Debut interview - Interview translation - NEK!

The young, technically skilled, internet-born girl band NEK! digitally released their major debut single "FLiCK" through Pony Canyon on June 10th.

Calling themselves a "slang rock band," NEK! formed in February 2024 after the members met each other on social media. The song marking their major debut is "FLiCK," which features edgy lyrics mixed with internet slang and a rough yet light sound. While satirizing today's social media society, the song radiates a positive and refreshing energy. It serves as a perfect introduction, packed with NEK!'s true identity.

In this interview, which marks their first appearance on Music Natalie, the band spoke extensively about everything from memories of their youth growing up with the internet and the four distinct musical roots of the members, to their grand ambition of reaching the Nippon Budokan as quickly as possible.

This is a phrase we thought of and created ourselves. The four of us connected through social media, so we use internet terms as a motif and drop them into our lyrics. Combining that with a rock base, we call ourselves a "slang rock band."

While I was active as a singer-songwriter, I wanted to form a band. I found everyone on social media, we met in person, and the result of us making music like this now is... NEK!.

Lately, even among musicians, there are a lot of people who find new acquaintances through social media, so I think it has become quite normal.

However, to actually meet like this and find girls I get along with so well feels like destiny. I really feel that way.

For me, it was in elementary school classes. We had time in the computer room to learn how to search for things and how to use social media.

Me too. We did our research using computers. When I entered junior high school, tablets were handed out.

Since I was little, I used to play online multiplayer games on the Nintendo 3DS a lot. In games like "Yo-kai Watch," sometimes there was voice chat, and other times we would just play in silence. The feeling of being connected to an unknown opponent, without knowing who or where they were, was just normal for me (laughs).

That is exactly right. It was a time when I couldn't perform live on the streets or at live houses even if I wanted to, so I thought about using the internet to broadcast my own music. Precisely because there was no place to broadcast, I kept uploading videos of myself playing and singing with just one smartphone. School classes were also online, and although I was able to go on my school trip, it was almost canceled.

I was hit directly by the COVID-19 pandemic around the end of high school. Since it was exam season, I don't think the impact of not being able to meet people was that big, but maybe because I was lonely, I talked on the phone with my friends a lot. I think social media was what I relied on then. Both the cultural festival and the sports festival were completely canceled, so we talked together about whether we could somehow leave some memories, and we did things like holding a small ball game tournament.

I was a junior high school student during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, it was still a period where I was resistant to showing my face on the internet. So although I played an instrument, I wasn't in a position to broadcast it. Instead, I made a fan account for a band I liked and interacted with people who liked the same band on X (Twitter at the time).

I was in another band before COVID, but about a year after we started activities, we entered the COVID period and had to temporarily stop. I thought about how to be active in a situation where we couldn't do live shows, and I consistently uploaded performance videos. There were also many people who said, "I want to go to a live show once COVID settles down." When I started activities with NEK!, a person who had been watching since that time talked to me at the merchandise booth. I strongly felt a sense of gratitude, realizing they are still supporting me now thanks to social media.

When I was in high school, I was scheduled to go to Okinawa, but my school trip got canceled. So, I have always thought it would be nice if we could go there on a tour with this band. It is completely different from a school trip, though (laughs).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was shut inside my house the whole time, playing, singing, and making songs. I don't want to say "thanks to COVID," but it is true that it became the trigger that made me think, "I have to broadcast myself on my own." Going through that, I was able to connect like this, and I feel very happy to be in an environment where I can freely do what I want to do like this now.

For my generation, normal life returned while we were in our youth, so my feeling might be a little different from everyone else's, but... It was right around the time I first started playing an instrument, so in a sense, I wonder if the COVID period was a preparation period to become who I am now. It feels like just as everyday life returned to normal, I was finally ready to start my own activities.

I came across an anime called "K-On!" around the 4th grade of elementary school, and I wanted to form a band. But there was no one around me to form one with, so I thought I had no choice but to do it alone. Wondering if the time would ever come when I'd meet my future bandmates, I uploaded videos of myself playing and singing to social media. My hometown is Nagasaki, but around junior high school, I started wanting to learn music seriously. I thought I had no choice but to go to Tokyo for this, so I came to Tokyo right after graduating from high school. While studying vocals at a vocational music school, I searched for my current members on social media and formed... NEK!

You think wrapping it up with "...NEK!" at the end makes it come together nicely, don't you? (laughs)

Influenced by my mother, I have really loved Masaharu Fukuyama and Hikaru Utada since I was little. I love their singing voices and respect them a lot, so I also wanted to become a singer-songwriter. But in the end, I really wanted to form a band. The band that influenced me is ONE OK ROCK. They are the first rock band I ever knew.

I started playing the electric guitar in elementary school. I started with a guitar I received from my father, and with Eric Clapton, whom I learned about through my father's influence. I practiced "Layla" the most. I still play it now. It has both single notes and chords, and the song is 8 minutes long, so I thought it would be good practice. After that, I found out about BABYMETAL on the internet, and I was amazed by the Kami Band's performance, thinking, "Guitar playing like this exists!" That is how I started to like hard rock.

Natsu had been continuously posting videos on YouTube since elementary school. I was moved when I watched them.

There were a few times when I thought about quitting, and I worried when my environment was changing. But precisely because I kept going, I was able to meet Hika and the other members, so I feel that continuation is important. Even if it didn't directly connect to my future, just continuing gives me confidence, and I think it was a really good thing to do.

Since I was in a theater company during elementary school, I had no resistance to standing on stage or showing my face. That might have been a good thing, too.

My father is a bassist, so I was familiar with the sound of the bass from a young age. Normally, you would think the guitar has a stronger presence, but I have a habit of naturally following the bass sound. My father taught me about X JAPAN and LUNA SEA, and when I listened to X JAPAN's "BLUE BLOOD," TAIJI-san's bass was so cool, and I wanted to play it myself. From there, I listened to a lot of bands from the 1990s, and when I came full circle, I encountered Gacharic Spin. It was the first time I saw a girl doing slap bass, and I thought, "Such a cute girl can do something so cool!" From there, it became my current playing style. I also like what you call jou-metal (all-female metal), but rather than being a fan of that specific scene, I am a Japameta (classic Japanese metal) fan. Bands like Aldious, LOUDNESS, VOLCANO, and AION. And everyone in the band teaches me about non-metal Japanese rock.

I encountered the drums when I was in my first year of junior high school. During a trial period for the brass band club, I tried all the parts, and at the very end, I was torn between the saxophone and percussion. When I had to say which one I wanted to do, "Percussion!" just suddenly popped out of my mouth. My brother's childhood friend played the drums in a brass band, and even as a child, I felt that a woman playing the drums looked incredibly cool. I had absolutely decided I was going to play the drums, but there was only one drum kit at the school. So, I ended up fighting over it with a classmate who was good at playing and had an electronic drum kit (laughs). I really didn't want to lose to that girl, so I also started taking drum lessons at the music school I was originally attending. My teacher at that time was yuri-san, who currently plays drums in Gacharic Spin. As I continued, I realized that rock suited my nature more than orchestral songs, and I started aiming to be a rock musician.

I really love Alstake. And as for BAND-MAID, it was a band we all loved in common, so we played songs from those two groups in the studio. I knew from the start that I wanted to play rock, but I didn't have a clear vision. I went into the studio feeling excited about what kind of sound everyone would make. From there, we talked about how, "precisely because we met on the internet, we want to write songs with the internet as a theme," and what was created is... the current NEK!

Again (laughs).

We thought about it quite a bit, right?

A lot of cool candidates came up, but the internet has been such a big presence for us, so we wanted to create our band name from internet terms. When we were looking up slang, we talked about how the word neki (a reliable older sister) would be good, and we decided on NEK!.

The term "[Something] neki" is used quite a lot on the internet, isn't it? Like the high school girl who was dancing to Tamio Okuda's "Sasurai" on TikTok being called "Sasurai neki."

Even in the comments of people reacting to watching anime overseas, "[Something] neki" is used. We also thought it was nice that it seemed like it could be understood overseas.

We were! The music video for our debut song "Get Over" received more of a reaction than we expected, and overseas fans also left comments. There are actually overseas fans who come to the live houses, so I really hope we can perform live overseas someday.

Everything is good, but... I guess it is their high level of performance skill and each person's character.

I respect everything about them, including how they present themselves on stage, like "singing everything coolly in any situation."

Also, the element of them being a girl band was big. Because they make cool sounds, give cool performances, and continue to fascinate many people... I think we couldn't help but discover them, too.

About three years before forming NEK!, I went to see BAND-MAID's one-man show at Zepp Shinjuku by myself. Something there really struck me deeply. I am glad that the first girl band I saw live was BAND-MAID.

All of us in NEK! went to see their live show, and we were able to greet them there! They told us, "We look forward to working with you as labelmates from now on"... Since I genuinely admire them, I ended up in a state where I liked my oshi (favorite member) too much to have a proper conversation (laughs).

They said, "You are practicing really hard," and "You have a lot of room to grow, so let's do our best together," and I almost cried.

When I started playing the bass, I was watching MISA-san on bass through the screen on YouTube. The person I had watched, thinking she was amazing, was right in front of my eyes. I was so deeply moved that, conversely, I couldn't interact with her normally.

We do. During our first nationwide tour, which visited 12 locations to commemorate our 2nd anniversary of forming, getting to know the members more than ever before was a big deal. Our performance skills have also improved, and I feel that our sound is completely different compared to when we first formed. I really feel that we are constantly evolving.

As expected, gaining more experience was huge. With each live show we played, we found issues, discussed together what to do by the next one to improve, and then tried it out at the next live show. Because the tour provided an environment where we could do that immediately, we were able to feel our growth enough that even we ourselves could recognize it. People in the industry had always been telling us, "A nationwide tour is a really good opportunity for a band to grow, so do your best," and I truly experienced that they were right.

A person who came to see us when we did our first one-man show at Shibuya eggman told us at the tour final, "I really feel that you have toured a lot," and that made me so happy. Being able to do trial and error immediately was a real learning experience, and our bond deepened as well. I think we have started to look even more like a band with a sense of unity.

For me, I was able to see sides of the members that I didn't know during the tour, and there was also a new side of myself that I discovered for the first time by being put in this situation. I feel like each of us has become stronger. We are still kids (laughs), but since we can now see the reliable sides of each other, I think we have become neki just like our band name.

This was relatively recent. It is a song we made for our major debut.

Along with the desire to show our NEK! style, we also had the thought that we wanted to make it more pop and genre-less. Because we live in the social media age, it is a song we made through trial and error, thinking about what exactly we want to convey.

We go into the studio, and we structure it while discussing things, with each part saying, "I want to include this kind of phrase." The guitar might say, "I want to include this kind of tapping," and the bass might say, "I want to include slap bass here." Putting it all together is really difficult, though (laughs).

For example, if we decide "we are using slap bass this time," we decide how to adjust the guitar sound, rhythm, and phrasing to match it. If it is an acoustic song, it is like figuring out how the three of us can expand on Hika's acoustic guitar arrangement.

It was my guitar riff. I wanted to use a riff using octaves, and I brought it out first in the studio saying, "How about something like this?"

I was saying, "I want to try singing it in a pop and refreshing way, so I want you to make it a slightly lighter, rhythmic feel," but since we wanted to base it in rock, we kept a heavy sound.

(Nodding deeply) Yes, that is exactly right

We gather and combine words that are currently being used on social media that catch our interest, and things we want to include in the lyrics.

We toss things like "words we are curious about lately" or "words we want to include" to each other on LINE.

Actually, "FLiCK" even includes the Nagasaki dialect. It might sound cute, but it is actually saying pretty sharp things, which gives it a certain flavor. There aren't many songs that include regional dialects, so I thought it would be interesting and tried putting it into "FLiCK."

This refers to flick input (Japanese smartphone input), but I thought the tapping feeling, like "po-po-po-po-pon," really matched the rhythmic and pop tune of this song. Furthermore, since it is a smartphone term connected to the internet and social media, I thought it was very true to NEK!.

When we talked about "What is our goal?", "Nippon Budokan" came up from all four of us. Our desire to absolutely stand there is strong. Because it would be scary to just keep holding up that goal and eventually lose sight of it, we decided that we will "stand at the Nippon Budokan fastest."

We are not the only girls' band; there are incredibly many of them out there. Right now is already the "Warring States period" of girls' bands. It is an era where it wouldn't be strange at all for a band born just a week ago to go viral, so I am thinking that we won't lose.

That is exactly why social media is super important.

The Tomeihan (Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka) tour to commemorate your major debut will start in September. Earlier, you mentioned that going on one tour led to a sense of unity, but what kind of tour do you want to make this next one?

I want to show a more evolved NEK!. I want to sell out all the performances, and convey an even stronger heat than the nationwide tour that visited 12 locations. I want to run through Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka in a rock style.

Maybe 23 songs.

If we include the new songs, aren't there about 25 songs?

That is right. For the recent nationwide tour, we changed the pattern for each show.

From now on, I want us to create even better live experiences together with everyone.

We are going to take the top!