The members of King Gnu talked to Billboard Japan for its Monthly Feature series, which highlights well-known acts and works right now. “TWILIGHT!!!,” the band’s newest single, was written as the theme song for the hit anime movie Detective Conan: One-Eyed Flashback. It came out online on April 18.
The “SPECIALZ” band’s first-ever home five-dome tour, called the King Gnu Dome Tour “THE GREATEST UNKNOWN,” drew 380,000 people. Soon after, the group went on its first tour of Asia, stopping in Taipei, Singapore, Shanghai, and Seoul. This made it even more popular outside of its home country.
The band’s new single is being used in the latest movie adaptation of the highly popular anime Detective Conan, which has a history of having hit theme songs. “TWILIGHT!!!” mixes sounds from the 1980s with Afro-inspired grooves to make a danceable track that changes a lot when played live. Daiki Tsuneta, Yu Seki, Kazuki Arai, and Satoru Iguchi, the band’s four members, talked about their new song. They say it builds on a new way of working they decided on while making their most recent album, THE GREATEST UNKNOWN.
We were pretty close to the crowd, which I think made things more tense. We could feel the audience’s emotion directly and without loss, and it showed in our staging and performance without us even realizing it. But our dome tour came right after our Asia tour, so it wasn’t like we went from big places to small clubs all of a sudden. We played halls during our Asian trek and had some time after that, so it was more of a gradual process.
On the Asia tour, Satoru Iguchi sang and played the keyboards. The show in Seoul had a great vibe, so we thought it would be fun to bring that to Japan at a place about the same size. People in Seoul cheered and sang a lot. Japanese fans of ours aren’t dull, but they are quiet because that’s how Japanese people are. In terms of our local fan club tour, we did hope that we’d be able to play with that much energy again.
