In 2023, the multi-hyphenate musician Yoshiki made his directorial debut with the documentary Yoshiki: Under the Sky, and became the first Japanese artist to have his handprints immortalized in cement at Hollywood’s Chinese Theatre. Now, a chance encounter on the small screen has led to him creating J-pop girl group Bi-ray, and they’re taking on Hollywood with “Butterfly,” the theme song for Rebel Wilson’s action comedy Bride Hard.
“I’m extremely busy. I’m doing a million projects,” chuckles Yoshiki, a 2025 TIME100 honoree who has his own wine, fashion line, nonprofit, and Hello Kitty character, as well as his supergroup The Last Rockstars and another documentary in production. “Why did I decide to take on another project? Because I had to. It’s an ‘I have no choice’ thing. Their talent is too strong not to be involved.”
Yoshiki discovered Bi-ray’s Emi, Michelle, Cocomi, and Hinata when he guest-judged the Japanese TV singing competition Kasho-Oh. “They wanted to have a ‘rock star’ to make a more entertaining show; I didn’t participate for the purpose [of creating a group],” he recalls. “But it was a destiny thing. I felt a connection with these talents.” And so, the J-rock icon who’s collaborated with George Martin, Queen, Bono, and St. Vincent, decided to form Bi-ray and write/produce their music. The name Bi-ray, which means “beauty” in Japanese, comes from a line in his pioneering visual kei band X Japan’s “Jade”.
Yoshiki was “shocked” to learn that these “super-talented” contestants, who made it onto the competitive TV show out of “a hundred thousand” auditioners, already knew and admired each other. But that’s why they gelled as a harmony quartet so easily. While powerhouse Emi had just won Kasho-Oh with the highest score in the series’ history, she never felt any rivalry with the others, and was excited about them joining forces. “After I won, I thought about the artist I wanted to become,” Emi explains. “We were friends, and have different vocal qualities and backgrounds. I was interested because when you operate as a group, you can collaborate and create something.”
The members’ musical idols include K-pop superstars BLACKPINK and L.A. multicultural girl group Katseye, but despite only being 14 to 16 years old, they were aware of Yoshiki’s legacy. Michelle loved X Japan’s “emotional and beautiful” music, and Emi knew Yoshiki was “very famous globally” because she’d actually heard his records while visiting her grandparents in Russia. But Cocomi felt the deepest connection to her mentor. Before competing on Kasho-Oh, she’d covered X Japan’s “Tears” to honor her late father; Yoshiki wrote the ballad about his own father, who died by suicide when Yoshiki was a child. “After my father passed away five years ago, ‘Tears’ was the first X Japan song I heard. I decided to sing it to show my father how much I’d grown,” Cocomi says. “When someone important passes away, you lose something. I have that commonality with Yoshiki. That’s something we share.”
“I write darker lyrics generally, because of what I went through,” explains Yoshiki, who has lost three X Japan bandmates. Composing a “girl power” anthem for a “Bridesmaids meets Die Hard” movie was obviously not in his wheelhouse, but he did “as much research as I could” about the Bi-ray members’ lives and the hardships they’d all experienced. “All artists go through stuff. Because they’re young, people may think they’re lucky, but they’re struggling even at this point. I respected that,” he muses. “I put that element in as well.”
The resulting “Butterfly” is ambitious and atypical for a debut pop single, or for a mainstream comedy flick, beginning as a sentimental Y2K-style ballad à la Vitamin C’s “Graduation” before lurching into a futuristic dubstep/popera breakdown. But a Japanese performance of “Butterfly” already has 16 million YouTube views, so fans clearly appreciate Bi-ray’s unique, multi-octave sound. “They have amazing range, so the first several bars go from really low to really high notes, where it’s almost impossible for just one person to be singing,” says Yoshiki. “And yes, my background is a bit gothic-y! But they can bring everything – vocals and edginess. ‘Butterfly’ was written to showcase their versatility from the get-go.”
While Michelle is Bi-ray’s only fluent English speaker (she’s half Canadian, Cocomi is half Filipina, and Emi is half Russian; all four members grew up in Japan), everyone connected to the song’s lyrics, which Cocomi says “express that we’re still in cocoons, about to fly into the future.” And that future looks bright, with Yoshiki using his connections in Hollywood, his home of 30 years, to introduce Bi-ray to the West.
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A Japanese act debuting via a major film is rare enough, but Yoshiki also directed the narrative version of the “Butterfly” video, which stars Bride Hard’s cast. He also facilitated Bi-ray’s first U.S. performance – at L.A.’s 56,000-capacity Dodger Stadium, singing the national anthem on Japanese Heritage Night – after the MLB powers-that-be were impressed enough by Bi-ray’s demo to grant the at-the-time unknown group an “unheard-of” opportunity. “It was surreal, unforgettable,” Emi marvels. “It made us want to work even harder to become an artist that performs internationally.” (Michelle’s dream, in fact, is for Bi-ray to play Coachella.)
Yoshiki has already recorded several tracks with Bi-ray for his U.S. label, Melodee Music, including “Slaying,” an industrial/EDM banger that showcases another aspect of their artistry, which was featured during MAISON YOSHIKI’s Paris Fashion Week Show last year. “The more I worked with them, the more possibilities I saw. I’m coming from both classical and rock; art doesn’t have just one side,” he explains. “They can go anywhere. There’s no limit.”
Yoshiki knows it’s challenging for Japanese artists to break America – he recalls X Japan’s infamous first early-’90s U.S. press conference, when they were “bombarded” by aggressively doubting journalists – but thankfully, the industry has undergone a “paradigm shift. Two, three decades ago, Asian entertainment being the center of attention in Western culture was impossible. Thanks to K-pop, that’s changing, drastically.” And Yoshiki believes it’s time for a J-pop explosion – led by Bi-ra
“It’ll happen, sooner or later,” he asserts. “If anybody can do it, they can.”
