Over a decade in the making, Ibaraki is the brainchild of Trivium guitarist and vocalist Matt Heafy. In creating this Japanese-themed black-metal album, Heafy enlisted Emperor mastermind and living black-metal legend Ihsahn to produce. The result is Rashomon, which shares its name with Akira Kurosawa’s iconic 1950 film but is actually a reference to the Kyoto city gates after which Kurosawa titled his movie. “It was Ihsahn who suggested that I tap into my Japanese heritage for these songs,” Heafy tells Apple Music. “I had never considered that possibility, so my mind was blown. I started revisiting all these fun Japanese folklore stories that my mom had taught me about, or that I had learned while researching designs for some of my tattoos. Within a week, I had the lyrics finished.” Below, he details each track.
“Hakanaki Hitsuzen”
“The title translates to ‘necessary fragility,’ which is something that Ihsahn told me that we needed to salvage from black metal. Originally, I was like, ‘Well, black metal’s all about mechanical precision on the instruments and very tight technical stuff.’ He’s like, ‘No. It’s the opposite. It’s actually very organic, an almost punk-rock sloppy thing that needs to happen.’ That’s the necessary fragility he was describing. My good friend Ken Sakurada, who owns Shin Sushi in Orlando, helped me with these translations and come up with this new Japanese term.”
“Kagutsuchi”
“Kagutsuchi is the Japanese god of fire. It’s something I’ve wanted to reference for a tattoo, but I can’t find a picture of him. He’s also known as Homusubi, and that means ‘he who starves fire.’ Which all sounds like ‘he who walks the fire breathes,’ which is, coincidentally, a Trivium lyric. This song was one of the first things I wrote for this record—back in 2010, 2011, and this is the one that made Ihsahn keen on the project.”
“Ibaraki-Dōji”
“Ibaraki-dōji is the demon of Rashomon. He’s the mascot of Trivium, also the name of this band, and it’s where this demon named Ibaraki-dōji, which means ‘demon child,’ was terrorizing Rashomon. A samurai named Watanabe no Tsuna chopped off the demon’s arm, but he comes back years later disguised as Watanabe’s aunt, grabs the arm, and turns back into Ibaraki-dōji. He’s never seen again in Japanese folklore.”
“Jigoku Dayū”
“‘Jigoku Dayū’ comes from a painting I saw at a museum in San Francisco when they had an exhibit of the Japanese courtesans. I didn’t know that prostitution was such a big thing in ancient Japanese culture, but there was this one piece of this woman in a kimono with all these scenes of hell, and I was really drawn to it. The story is that Jigoku Dayū had a noble life but was captured by bandits and forced into prostitution. To symbolize what she felt her life was, she made a kimono with all these etchings of hell. She’s known as the Hell Courtesan.”
“Tamashii No Houkai”
“Ihsahn has a record called Das Seelenbrechen, which is one of my favorite things that he’s done. The title is German for ‘the breaking of the soul.’ I asked my friend Ken if we could recreate that idea in Japanese, so the title is another term that we invented. Tamashii no Houkai means ‘soul collapse’ or ‘soul breaking.’ It was co-written by Ihsahn—I think they might be Emperor riffs that he never used—and he does a guitar solo on this one, too.”
“Akumu” (feat. Nergal)
“‘Akumu’ translates to ‘Nightmare.’ I wrote this song and ‘Tamashii’ before knowing this would be a Japanese project, so that’s why they’re a little bit different. When I presented Nergal with the track, I asked him to translate the lyrics to Polish and sing them that way. Just by coincidence, [drummer] Alex [Bent] was playing a reggaetón beat, so we’ve got a black-metal song with Polish screaming, a Japanese theme, and a reggaetón beat. Which, I’m pretty sure, is something that’s never happened before.”
“Komorebi”
“Komorebi is a Japanese term that already exists. It means ‘sunlight filtered through leaves on trees.’ I just thought it was so Japanese that there was a word for that kind of description. But the song is a lot like something I would write for Trivium, where it’s a new story that sort of pictures the world of Ibaraki like a Japanese version of that show Vikings. It’s mostly acoustic, but it crescendos into this big, electric cacophony of sounds.”
“Rōnin” (feat. Gerard Way)
“I think it’s so fun that a guy from Trivium and a guy from My Chemical Romance recorded a black-metal song together. Everyone always asks why Gerard Way is on the song. We’ve been pen pals for years, just as I have been with Ihsahn and Nergal. We first met at a big Australian festival called Big Day Out. We were the only metal band on it, but the promoter invited us both to dinner, thinking we’d get along. And we did—super well. We talked about comics and food and singing. Then, a couple years back, we started talking about black metal and I asked him to be on the track.”
“Susanoo No Mikoto”
“Susanoo no Mikoto is the Japanese storm god who was expelled from heaven in the Shinto religion. What I like about the Japanese stories of the gods is a lot like Norse mythology or Greek mythology, but Shintoism isn’t a mythology—it’s an actual religion. My mom practices Shinto. But the gods are imperfect, which I love. In this story, Susanoo kills an eight-headed dragon by getting each of the heads drunk on sake so he can save a fisherman’s daughter and force her to marry him. I have the whole story tattooed on my back.”
“Kaizoku”
“Kaizoku is the Japanese term for ‘Viking,’ which is a word I’d never seen before. I’ve described the outro as having an almost Nightmare Before Christmas vibe, if it had happened in Eastern Europe—or a kind of spaghetti western gypsy sound. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who’s a journalist in Prague, and she said it actually makes sense because spaghetti westerns were inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s films. So, the whole thing came around.”