Over the past few years, I haven’t listened to as much screamo as I once did, focusing more on traditional hardcore punk. Still, every now and then a new band comes along and blows my mind. Serotonin Mist from Japan are one of those bands for me.
Formed in Tokyo in 2023, Serotonin Mist features vocalist Hiroshi, formerly of the excellent Asthenia, and members of other Japanese acts, including Okinawa legends The Cops Are Inside Us and newer post-rock band Lacrima.
In 2024, Serotonin Mist released two stunning demos, both super short yet packed with a chaotic explosion of late ’90s screamo and chugging hardcore reminiscent of early Converge, Frail, and Unbroken. Their lyrics also stand out, so I decided to interview their singer at the end of 2024, sensing it would be a great feature.
Read on as we discuss Serotonin Mist’s music, the history of Japanese emo/screamo, contemporary Japanese politics, and Orchid/Saetia reunions.
All answers by Hiroshi Sasagawa, photos by Yahmasoworks.
Serotonin Mist started in 2023 but you’ve already been in other bands like Asthenia and The Cops Are Inside Us. Can you tell us about the band’s origins? Do you all live in the same part of Tokyo?
The last show Asthenia played was in March 2023, opening for June of 44. A few weeks after that show, we had a meeting to discuss our future plans. It was really painful, and I realized some members had completely lost their passion for Asthenia. We had put so much effort into the band, and I at least wanted a farewell show to end things properly, but that didn’t happen. Honestly, I had no intention of starting another band after Asthenia, but the way it ended wasn’t at all how I’d imagined, so I felt like, “Damn, I can’t end it like this!” That’s what pushed me to form a new band, haha.
Around that time, I found out that Sergei, a Russian international student who used to come to Asthenia’s shows, had returned to Japan after the coronavirus restrictions were lifted. I knew he wanted to start a band in Japan, so I asked if he’d like to do a band with me for fun, and he agreed. Then Sergei brought in Makino, a bassist who had just moved from Kyoto to Tokyo and was also looking to start a band. In turn, Makino introduced us to Ryuho—a drummer for the post-rock band Lacrima—who wanted to play in a heavier band too. Finally, I invited Hiropon-san, who was in a legendary Okinawan screamo band called The Cops Are Inside Us. I knew he’s a talented riff writer and shares my taste in hardcore (Unbroken, Yaphet Kotto, Struggle, Reversal of Man, early Converge, American Nightmare, The Hope Conspiracy’s Cold Blue album, etc.), but hadn’t played music since The Cops went on hiatus in 2019. Fortunately, he was down to join, and that’s how we formed this band.
At first, I was just happy to be playing in a band again, but we clicked almost right away. It took only a few jams for us to see this band’s potential. I remember we wrote “お惣菜 (Deli Foods)” in just two hours, and I replayed the voice memo from that rehearsal over thirty times the next day, thinking, “This might be the best band I’ve ever been in.” I’m really lucky to be in a band with these amazing people, both as musicians and as friends.
Currently, all of us except Sergei live in Tokyo—not in the exact same neighborhood, but close enough to meet easily. Sergei lives in Chiba, so it takes him over an hour by train to get to Tokyo, but he does his best to show up for every rehearsal.
The songs on both your demos sound incredibly well-produced and powerful. How long did it take to write and record these songs? Where do you draw your musical influences?
Thanks for the kind words. We wrote and recorded these five songs in the first six months after our very first rehearsal. Sanity / Deli Foods were recorded in December 2023, while The Pack was recorded in January 2024. Both recording sessions were wrapped up in one day, and we tracked them live except for vocals, because we wanted raw aggression more than perfection and clarity. Ryo Hisatsune from Studio Zot (who engineered and mixed most of Asthenia’s recordings) mixed both demos, and he did a great job as always. After that, I tweaked them a bit in Ableton Live to make things a little dirtier and rawer, which suits our taste.
As for musical inspiration, even before our first rehearsal, I had a vision of what I wanted for this band. You know the Reversal of Man song “Get the Kid with the Sideburns”? It’s that infamous diss track to Earth Crisis, where they drop a “Firestorm” riff in the middle of the song just to piss off the EC guys—and it’s absolutely killer. They did it sarcastically, but I wanted to capture that style in earnest: short, chaotic, emotional hardcore with huge metallic breakdowns. I also wanted to keep something close to what Asthenia did musically, but from a fresh angle.
My idea was to make the songs as short as possible, inspired by how I’d been listening to a lot of Earl Sweatshirt at the time. I liked his one-verse-and-that’s-it approach, and thought it’d be interesting to bring that structure to ’90s emotive hardcore, like Indian Summer. So I told everyone, “My vision is basically Gethekidwiththesideburns-core and Earlsweatshirt-core,” and luckily, they were down with it.
Other bands that inspire us, in my opinion, include Unbroken, Indecision, early Converge, early Dillinger Escape Plan, Orchid / Ampere, Neil Perry / The Now, Instil / You & I, emo stuff like Engine Down, Staynless, Nebraska, slower things like Codeine and Slint, plus newer acts like Letters to Catalonia, Slow Fire Pistol, Abrasion, Tourniquet, and Magnitude.
The history of emo/screamo in Japan is not well known around the world, and probably not well documented in Japan either. Could you share some insights into its origins? Were ’90s bands like Envy, Eastern Youth, Swipe, Kulara, Cowpers, Bonescratch, and Endzweck among the first Japanese emocore/screamo bands? How did the scene come to life?
When I got into this scene (late aughties), most of these bands were already disbanded or had evolved into different forms, so I didn’t see the entire history firsthand. Still, I can share what I know.
From what I understand, around the mid-to-late ’90s, Tokyo bands like Sawpit, Wise Up, Envy, Slimefisher, Swipe, Wall, and Driving Box (who only released one hard to find demo tape); Hokkaido bands like Next Style, Dignity for All, Cowpers, Bonescratch; Tokai-area bands like Cigaretteman, Fragment, Maniac High Sence; Sendai bands like Half Life and Spike Shoes; and DIY/indie punk labels like Snuffy Smile, Never Shown Face, HG Fact, Straight Up, plus fanzines like Mission Undone and Will You, laid the groundwork for a Japanese emocore scene to form.
Some of them originally played Youth Crew (Wise Up, Next Style), NYHC (Envy), or ’90s metalcore (Half Life). But through listening to records, reading zines, and hanging out with friends—and probably seeing bands like Spitboy and Los Crudos when they toured Japan around 1995–1996—they began picking up new ideas and shifting their sound. They started their own distros and fanzines, writing lyrics in Japanese that actually made sense, rather than broken English. They also booked rehearsal studio or public space gigs so entry prices could stay low for younger audiences, and hosted bands like Four Hundred Years, Braid, and Eversor from abroad to tour in a DIY manner.
For many people, it was revolutionary—a capitalism-free musical movement led by teenagers and youth. Yet Japan was still a wealthy country at the time, so band members often flew to the United States or Canada, checked out DIY shows there, and came back with new records, ideas, and information. Then Envy began releasing classic after classic; Swipe evolved into There is a Light That Never Goes Out, which held the strongest DIY policy in the scene; meanwhile, bands like Kulara and Nine Days Wonder appeared, releasing mind-blowing records. In 2001, these four bands played together at a 600-capacity venue, and it was a huge success.
Many in the audience that night formed the next wave of bands like 3cmtour and Gauge Means Nothing, spreading through distros, fanzines, and tours. The scene got bigger and extended to various cities in Japan—Kyoto, Fukuoka, Okinawa, Kagawa, Okayama, Hyogo, Fukushima, Yamagata, and more. That’s how our scene came into being. I even double-checked this part with some OGs, so I think it’s not too far off from what actually happened!
I was excited to read the English translations of your lyrics and discover how political they are, addressing topics like the rise of right-wing rhetoric and fascism, poverty, exploitation, and misogyny. Are your songs solely a critique and reflection of today’s politics in Japan and the world, or are you also proposing alternatives?
The main focus of my lyrics is to reflect the reality and problems of our society, and make people realize that the oppression and discrimination we all treat as normal is actually unacceptable and something we should be angry about. People can get used to hell and eventually forget that they’re in hell. In the worst case, they even develop Stockholm Syndrome toward those who put them there. So I think it’s hopeful to recognize that the place you’re in is actually hell, that you’re a victim of an oppressor, and that you have the right to say “fuck you” to them.
I feel like too many people in Japan adopt a slave mentality, believing change is something bestowed by those in power, rather than something they can bring about themselves. We have the right to disobey rules if we feel they’re unjustly set, but so many people follow them blindly—like running an obstacle race. In our song “正気 (Sanity),” my lyrics list all the ugly things I see in daily life and end with this line:
Don’t be a slave competing for obedience to the given circumstances
That’s the message I want to convey with this band. So, yes, I suppose I am proposing alternatives—namely, alternative ways of thinking and alternative ideas.
With the war in Ukraine ongoing for over 1,000 days, how has having a Russian guitarist in the band influenced Serotonin Mist’s music and message?
That’s something we felt we should address somewhere, so thanks for asking. First off, to us, he’s our friend Sergei. Stereotypes about his background don’t necessarily reflect who he is. He’s anti-Putin and anti-war.
To be perfectly clear: we’re all against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And we’re essentially against all invasions, imperialism, and colonization—be it by other countries or our own.
As for whether his Russian background has influenced our music and message, I’d say it hasn’t really changed our sound all that much (though he does bring some beautiful melodies). Maybe it affects our message more.
Our song “共同体 (Community)” has lyrics like:
Vivid color of blood becomes cloudy by dusts of broken buildings
Poverty of imagination leads to misery in distant lands
If you look away, you can’t see it
No solidarity with the ones who say “resistance is evil”
No matter how many times society destroys our emotions, I will say it again and again
We won’t let you take away our right to live
We all have human rights
This part is clearly influenced by the Israeli genocide in Palestine, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and Japan’s past invasions and genocides in other parts of Asia. It also addresses how political apathy enables these crimes against humanity. I wanted it to be clear through this song, given that our lineup includes four guys from a country still trying to rewrite a history of invasion, genocide, and war crimes in the last century, and one guy from a country currently invading and killing people in another.
Since Western media rarely covers news about Japan beyond pop culture, could you share your thoughts on current political issues that you feel are important? Also, with Trump being re-elected as US president, how has this been received in Japan?
There are many issues, but I’ll just pick two. The first is racism against Kurds, which is getting extremely dangerous right now. It suddenly became a hot topic among racists, as if they picked an easy target to satisfy their xenophobic needs. You have people who didn’t even know Kurds were in Japan until recently, evil politicians who realized discrimination can win votes, and irresponsible influencers who learned discrimination can make money—all of them uniting, and it snowballed into a huge problem. They claim the Kurdish community is disturbing the peace and trying to take over Kawaguchi (where the largest-yet-still-small Kurdish community in Japan lives). They spread hate speech on SNS and YouTube, and even harass them in real life with hateful demonstrations, anonymous calls to Kurdish restaurants, and various other forms of intimidation. I fully condemn anyone complicit in such discrimination.
The second issue is the barbarism of the US Army in Japan. The unequal relationship between US forces and locals isn’t new, but last year was nothing short of a nightmare. Soldiers at a US military base in Okinawa raped five women (one of whom was a five-year-old girl), and five American bases (in Aomori, Tokyo, Kanagawa twice, and Okinawa) polluted Japan’s water sources by leaking massive amounts of fire extinguishing foam. Meanwhile, Biden and Kamala Harris pressured the Japanese government to acquit a US soldier, Ridge Alkonis, arrested for driving while asleep and killing two Japanese people—getting him released from a Japanese prison and sent back to the US. Some American politician even demanded Japan apologize for jailing him, as if our lives mean nothing to them. All of this happened in a single year, but it’s always been this way, especially in Okinawa, for nearly 80 years. If these racists harassing Kurds were truly “conservative,” they wouldn’t be silent about it. Instead, many of them mock protesters against US military bases. That shows how ugly they are. They’re not conservatives but authoritarians who bow to any authority stronger than them, and feel like they themselves are “the authority” when they find an easy target to bully. It’s also worth noting that a surprisingly large number of xenophobes and racists in Japan love Trump, ironically not realizing they act like pigs who love their butcher.
Trump’s re-election has been widely reported in Japan. But mostly people just accept his return, focusing only on its effect on Japan–US relations. Honestly, no matter who is president, as long as the LDP (The Liberal Democratic Party, aka Jimintō) remains in power, I doubt Japan will ever challenge this master–servant relationship with the US. But the fact that Trump is now president again could mean the US might veer toward self-destruction. I’m worried because we saw how Shinzo Abe acted in his second term—maybe as a reaction to his failed first term, he strengthened fascist policies, took control of the press and media, and centralized power in himself and the LDP, setting democracy back to what seems like an irreversible point. His “dark energy” seemed fueled by the resentment he felt over his first term’s failures. I’m concerned the same thing may happen in America (or maybe it’s happening already). I know my American friends aren’t apathetic to fascism, but the next four years will be tough.
Switching from heavy topics back to music can be a bit challenging, but I’d like to ask about the current Japanese hardcore and emo/screamo scene. What are your shows like, and is there a local community you feel connected to?
I’ll just talk about Tokyo since that’s where we are. Tokyo is a small city, but its hardcore punk scene is huge. New bands form almost every week, plenty of OG bands are still active, and it’s not unusual to see five or six hardcore/punk shows on the same day. Of course, the scene is split into smaller subgenres, but I feel like it’s all loosely connected. Typically, there’ll be five or six bands on a bill, and instead of just one style, mixed-bill shows are more common—and that’s what I prefer.
Musically, we’re probably too heavy for the emo/screamo/indie crowd, and too emo for the hardcore punk/powerviolence crowd, so we haven’t quite found a place we fit or feel connected to yet. But I really sympathize with this politically minded hardcore punk band in Tokyo called The Breath, and the diverse community they’re building. I love what they’re doing.
I’ve heard that it’s very expensive to do anything in Tokyo and that many bands rent studios or rehearsal spaces to hold shows. Is that true? I’d be interested to hear more about the venues where you play and how a DIY emo/screamo gig actually happens in Japan. Is it true that very few people own a car to carry the backline?
It’s partly true, partly no longer the case. Japan has gotten really cheap over the last ten years—if you come to Tokyo from big cities in the States, Europe, or other wealthy countries, it feels like everything’s on sale. But renting a proper music venue (a “live house”) is still expensive for smaller bands. The average entry price at a live house is around ¥2,500 ($16), plus you’re forced to pay an extra ¥500–700 ($3–5) for a drink at the door because most live houses are licensed as “restaurants.” So, in total, it’s around ¥3,000 ($20), which feels too high for a DIY punk show.
Yes, it’s true we often hold shows at rehearsal studios. That’s a culture pioneered by older emocore bands in Tokyo like Swipe in the ’90s, to keep entry prices lower and break down barriers between bands and the audience. Over the years, that practice spread throughout the entire Japanese hardcore & punk scene. Currently, I think there are at least 15 rehearsal studios in Tokyo that allow bands to host gigs, and it’s generally much cheaper than a live house. Maybe 50% of our shows this year took place in rehearsal studios.
And yeah, very few people in the scene own a car in Tokyo. I personally know only one or two friends here who do. It’s such a compact city that you can easily get around by train, bus, or bicycle. I don’t even have a driver’s license because I’ve never felt the need for one. Plus, 99% of the venues (live houses or rehearsal studios) provide the basic gear—amps, drums, mics, etc.—so you just need to bring your own instruments and pedals. If it’s an unorthodox space needing a full backline, we’ll just rent cars for that.
In recent years, screamo has gained popularity on TikTok and Instagram, and bands like Orchid, Saetia, and pg.99 have held reunion shows with thousands of young and older folks excited to see them. I imagine many people from Japan also traveled for those events. Do you have an opinion on why these bands have become so popular years after their initial run?
I think one of the biggest reasons is the presence or absence of the internet. They were active back when the internet was still in its infancy, and to hear their music, you had to actually buy records or CDs. They weren’t part of big hardcore labels like Revelation or Victory, so their records were only available at shows, DIY distros, and mail orders. Back then, I think they were almost a mystery—just unknown to the wider world.
Another reason is that bands influenced by them became popular. Speaking from my own experience, Thursday was basically borderline mainstream at the time, yet they had roots in the late ’90s screamo scene and often mentioned bands like You & I and Saetia in interviews. Some of their fans got into screamo that way (myself included). I think it was important that once we were curious about these underground bands, downloading existed as a way to listen. Then, when Touché Amoré and Pianos Become the Teeth got really popular in the early 2010s, a lot of their fans looked into these bands’ influences and found Pg.99 or Orchid, then spread them further via the internet. Illegal downloading was huge at that point, and I remember the number of screamo listeners quickly growing on Blogspot, forums, Tumblr, message boards, MediaFire, etc.
After that, Spotify and Apple Music became popular, and algorithms plus playlists made it even easier for anyone to discover their music. I feel Instagram and TikTok function somewhat like how hardcore forums/message boards used to, in terms of sharing (mis)information and exchanging (bullshit) thoughts, though I’d say they’re less toxic because you’re not scrolling through ten meaningless posts filled with vice, misogyny and homophobia just to find the one piece of info you need, haha.
Of course, the most important thing is that the music these bands made was super cutting-edge, convincing, and still holds up today. Back then, only a small group of people knew them, so it’s great they’ve reunited and now enjoy a much bigger audience. On the other hand, there’s a quote—supposedly from Ian MacKaye in a Japanese webzine—that says something like, “A new idea, a new approach doesn’t start in front of 2,000 people. It starts in front of 20–25.” I agree with that. I love Orchid, Saetia, Frail, Unbroken, Portraits of Past, Jawbreaker, etc., and it’s nice to watch them with nostalgia, but in many cases new movements don’t come from these reunited bands.
New movements, and the most exciting, valuable art, are always being made by contemporary artists. I think it’s more worthwhile to support new underground acts who are experimenting with new ideas than reunion bands doing it for fun (not that that’s a bad thing, like I said).
What’s next for Serotonin Mist? Are you planning to record an album? Will your music be released in physical format anytime soon? Do you also play in any other bands we should check out?
We did pre-production for the album last month (December 2024), and we plan to record in March. The format will likely be a CD, self-released around summer. Right now, this is the band we’re all focusing on. Finally, thank you so much for the interview. And thank you very much for reading until the end.
