Lol gravy. I think they’re going deeper into sludge territory, the first minute fifteen of TDIM is sludge with cleaner production than true sludge. But yeah they’re not what I would call a sludge band or anything.
I personally prefer they do their own thing and take from genres rather than go whole hog in the mud. I think hearing different elements infused into the sound they’ve always had is cool. They’re the prog doom sludge metal of my dreams, but I can see why it’s not palatable to everyone.
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You’re right, they’ve never done a hard commit persay to any one genre. And it’s what keeps them interesting. I don’t actually expect them to go full sludge or anything. My reply was mostly in playful jest!
I honestly wouldn’t mind if they leaned more into a sludgier sound for new stuff, instead of trying to write very “operatic” and “theatrical” stuff with such a low tuning. I actually really liked the Tsumi to Batsu remake far more than the original, fit the subject matter more I feel.
A more sludgy industrial take on their Ouroboros and DSS era sounds would be cool.
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Agreed for the most part.
Some of their albums are mostly internally consistent to a genre, with Six Ugly and VULGAR being the best examples.
One could include MARROW if not for the three ballads.
A full sludge album could be great. Include a re-recording of Warsaw and we’re golden. Conversely, while the hardcore cookie monster ooga booga fans might enjoy it, casuals are likely to find this kind of material boring.
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Can we compromise with a sludge EP instead?
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Wow, what a great interview! Toshiya speaks with great eloquence, intelligence, and wisdom.
I archived the text after the spoiler below just in case it gets taken offline.
JaME Interview with Toshiya from DIR EN GREY 2024
Interview with Toshiya from DIR EN GREY
01/05/2024
Author: Lucy C.H.
Translator: JBH
Interpreter Masa Eto
DIR EN GREY bassist Toshiya spoke with JaME in Paris during the band’s “FROM DEPRESSION TO ________ [mode of Withering to death. & UROBOROS]” tour.
In Paris, ragged clouds drift across a silent grey sky. The early spring weather is not kind to the small crowd that’s started to gather outside the Bataclan. The venue’s very name is a French word that evokes fanfare, and yet, the bubble that formed around it is quiet and suspenseful - how long until it bursts?
Inside its maze of leopard print-lined backstage rooms is Toshiya, bassist of DIR EN GREY. A towering presence with gentle manners, he twirls a silver chain bracelet between his fingers as he opens up to JaME about the band’s impressions of the tour so far, recent releases, future plans and the role music plays during turbulent times.
It’s been four years since your last European tour. A lot has happened in the world since then. DIR EN GREY carried out several activities to stay in touch with their foreign fans, but your return to Europe was a much-awaited event. How do you feel being back today?
Toshiya: We are really happy to be back. This year our tour started in Warsaw, and we are now halfway through our Paris performances. The differences in fan energy between countries is not as obvious as one might think. We felt their excitement and their energy during our opening shows in Poland, and that had a huge impact on us as a band. But during our first show in Paris, [mode of Withering to death.], the crowd was one. It was as if the venue came together to share its power with us. We felt honoured to be there with them.
Two years ago you released your eleventh studio album, PHALARIS. What can you tell us about this release?
Toshiya: PHALARIS is a concept album. There is one storyteller from start to end, and one story that is being told. We had tried to do something similar with UROBOROS and DUM SPIRO SPERO. PHALARIS was named after a torture device: the brazen bull. There are people who feel scared when they think of torture, others see it as a form of salvation. There are two sides to it; one word, two ways of understanding it. Some people will listen to PHALARIS and feel terror, others will feel a sense of catharsis.
PHALARIS included remakes of two of your most popular singles from the past, mazohyst of decadence and ain’t afraid to die. More recently, you released the single 19990120 to celebrate your 1999 major debut, which includes remakes of songs from the same year. And yet, the intention was not to change the essence of these songs, was it?
Toshiya: I think it is in an artist’s ego to want to remake older songs. But once you release a song, it is not yours anymore. It no longer belongs to you as an artist. It belongs to the listener, it is something that is given to, and shared, with the people. It is no longer our own thing that we can go on shaping, changing however we want. Once a song is no longer yours, you can’t do that - shouldn’t do that.
So this time, when we remade these older songs, we resisted the compulsion to make major changes. We kept their nostalgic side, the essence of the song that our listeners like, because these songs now belong to them. If we made any changes, they would be new songs, and they wouldn’t belong to them anymore. If we had made considerable changes, we would have done it for our own egos as artists, and we wouldn’t have kept that sense of belonging intact.
For this tour you chose to pay tribute to your albums Withering to death. and UROBOROS. Why these two, and how are they different in terms of mood?
Toshiya: We chose these two albums because they are like Yin and Yang. Darkness and light. Withering to death. has a much lighter atmosphere than UROBOROS. The latter’s mood is a lot more sombre. The atmosphere of each album is reflective of our life experiences as a band, of what we were going through while each of these albums was being produced.
As DIR EN GREY, we’ve undergone a significant evolution since we released those two records. As individuals, all five of us experienced our own metamorphosis. After 20 years, the difference is that we no longer approach DIR EN GREY as a five-piece act, but simply as a whole. We adopted a much broader perspective of what we are as an act.
The first time you played in Europe was in 2005. Was playing outside of Japan a part of your broadening perspective on DIR EN GREY?
Toshiya: I remember when we played in Germany for the first time. It was with our Withering to death. repertoire, precisely. Until then, we had never considered the possibility of playing outside of Japan. But it was with UROBOROS that we started to think of DIR EN GREY as a worldwide band. From belonging to Japan to belonging to the world; that is a good example of our perspective shifting from micro to macro at that stage of our career.
And after all these years, DIR EN GREY shows no signs of relenting. You will release your 34th single, The Devil In Me, in April…
Toshiya: And I believe this is a single that is going to be different from DIR EN GREY’s usual style. If you listen to the songs only once, you won’t get it. I think you’ll need to listen to it several times, and then you may get it. As a bass player, I tried to shape my part of the sound to make it stay with the listener. Outside of them, or inside, the more they listen. I wanted my bass lines to cut into them, and stay with them. I want the listener to think about it, feel about it after listening. I want them to think; “something is here, in the room with me, something stayed behind from that song, and that something clung to me”.
DIR EN GREY has been a band for 27 years. It’s very unusual for a band to stay together that long. What can we expect next?
Toshiya: You can never foresee what the future will be like. To be honest, the way I see it, we will just continue playing as DIR EN GREY. For as long as we can, and even if we only have one fan left in the world, I would still feel like playing for that one person. As individuals, we all have very different artistic styles, and there is a lot that we still want to explore solo-wise. The constraint with DIR EN GREY is that we are not a one-man show, we are an act, an amalgam of five. One of us cannot single-handedly change our artistic direction based on his own style. There is a lot that we want to challenge, musically, but it has to fit. Whatever we do next has to be DIR EN GREY.
We are thrilled to have DIR EN GREY back in Europe, even if we wish we met during happier times. Europe is going through a rough patch, with rising conflicts in the East and the unrelenting threat of terror attacks. Just yesterday, 60 people were murdered at the Crocus City Hall in Moscow during a rock concert. The venue where you’ll be playing today - Paris’ Bataclan - saw over 90 casualties at the hands of gunmen during a metal concert in 2015. How do you feel, as a musician, playing here today?
Toshiya: I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. And I wonder, what can music do in the face of such tragedies? Music cannot save the world. Music is only entertainment. You can only enjoy it if your most basic needs have been met. Only then can you make space in your life to appreciate an art form such as music. And yet…music can feed the soul to an extent. It can bring you a sense of comfort, of satisfaction.
We are in France as we speak, the country of the revolution. It was not music that changed the world, but music might have brought comfort to the people during dark times. Given the current state of the world, I know music is but tangential satisfaction, but I dearly hope tonight brings our listeners some comfort.
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Sorry if I bother about Dir en tabs again, but by “No one tabbed…” you mean official Dir en grey tab books or fan tabs as well? Because TIW, Phalaris, and Arche had been vastly covered plus tabbed by certain dedicated Dir en grey fans / YT content creators.
(There is also a guitar tuning thread about this, incl. that funky Die tuning for Hageshisa single + Dozing Green)
Based on a quick look at fan tabs. I’m aware that they have tab books, but the contents of those aren’t readily available on the internet so I stick with what I could find. PHALARIS is the one that’s lacking the most since it’s the newest. Most other albums are widely tabbed out.
Ok, makes sense. Though tab-wise Phalaris is not necessarily lacking these days! There is one Japanese Dir fan that covered + tabbed about 95% of the whole album (incl. bonus tracks, especially that otherwise untabbable Mazohyst remake) on YT. I am sure they are also following our forum as we speak 
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I gave up on fan made tabs years ago because they’re quite often terrible. You get some good ones but honestly the majority are not right, some really obviously so. Haha.
Offtopic but speaking of “untabbable” songs (especially lo-fi ones from 1997/1998), here’s a crazy 2024 live idea I thought that they should implement in case no one suggested it yet:
They should do anniversary encores w/ “Ranshishoku / Ai Murasaki Iro” and “Setsuna” since they haven’t done so last year nor back in 2013. More hi-fi recordings would be cool too
Throw in some La: Sadie’s songs too!
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For the most part, scorebooks aren’t made by the band, they’re made by a transcriber at whatever company is contracted to make it, and are often full of their own inaccuracies. Lots of old Metallica fans could rant at you for HOURS about how wrong a lot of the officially published scorebooks for Metallica records have been lmao
Unless you’re buying tabs directly from the artist, like how Polyphia and Jason Richardson sell their own tabs their websites, whether it’s a fan-tab or not I don’t really think makes that big of a difference toward accuracy. And even those two examples, both artists use Guitar Pro as composition tools and have a lot of the parts already tabbed before they even play it on a real instrument for the first time lol
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I’m of two minds.
When I hear joints like RINKAKU, The Devil In Me, Oboro, and even Ningen, I think there’s a nice balance between OG DEG playing styles and the more 7 stringy stuff.
The only issue I have is that there’s a good chunk of their 7 string songs that don’t translate well In a live setting. Im of the strong opinion that most of the ARCHE and DSS era stuff should be banned from setlists.
As for a lower tuning, Im also for it but we also gotta consider what Kyo’s vocal range can handle. And I suspect since these guys are stuck in their ways creatively, I dunno how much different the music would be.
If anything I vouch for more songs in drop A# 7 string. Compared to the other A tuning, there’s less tracks in that tuning. Id love another long track (not diabolos cuz it sucks) in that lane.
Or…I wouldn’t be mad if they pulled a trivium and wrote new songs in either the drop A tunings and the OG drop c# tuning. Forces them to be more grounded.
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Seeing the DSS material played live was rough early on. As an album it’s next level.
I wonder what influence, if any, Fukushima had on the developed sound of DSS. Warsaw no Gensou feels like it came out of nowhere. It stylistically fits with Tsumi to Kisei so I wonder if that “sludgier” sound was in the works initially. The Blossoming Beezlebub kinda fits that vibe too.
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Just had an interesting thing pop up, got my DeG spotify playlist on shuffle while doing stuff and the Blossoming Beelzebub plays, but that bass part right at the end of the song leading into the original re-recording of Zan is actually PERFECT!!! Hahaha.
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IIRC, DSS was already written, but not yet recorded at that time. They had some interviews back then where they were like “no, we were done writing” because everyone was asking how the disaster affected the album.
Toshiya: I think it is in an artist’s ego to want to remake older songs. But once you release a song, it is not yours anymore. It no longer belongs to you as an artist. It belongs to the listener, it is something that is given to, and shared, with the people. It is no longer our own thing that we can go on shaping, changing however we want. Once a song is no longer yours, you can’t do that - shouldn’t do that.
So this time, when we remade these older songs, we resisted the compulsion to make major changes. We kept their nostalgic side, the essence of the song that our listeners like, because these songs now belong to them. If we made any changes, they would be new songs, and they wouldn’t belong to them anymore. If we had made considerable changes, we would have done it for our own egos as artists, and we wouldn’t have kept that sense of belonging intact.
This part of the interview doesn’t really make sense to me considering how many songs they re-recorded while heavily altering/revamping them.
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Maybe it was a learning process and he cane to this conclusion?
He says “this time, we resisted […] the compulsion to make major changes”. Doesn’t this imply they did not resist at other time? So he is aware they did alter other songs more.
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