Midori Tatematsu, Miyako Watanabe: Lovebites reveal New Mini Album: Battle Against Damnation and are confirmed for Wacken - check out the smoking soloing!

Japan’s heavy metal heroines LOVEBITES revealed the title of their upcoming mini album today during their sold-out tour finale in Tokyo. Entitled Battle Against Damnation, the title is scheduled for release from 6 June 2018 via JPU Records and follows on from LOVEBITES’ first studio album Awakening From Abyss. The news comes days after the band announced that they will be performing at Wacken Open Air 2018 this August.

Bass-player miho and vocalist asami comment on the themes of the mini-album;
“Humanity is faced with battles on a daily basis. Each person has their own fight, whether it’s illness, time, solitude, war or something else they have to face.” (miho)

“However, we consider that humanity’s most serious adversary is its own destiny. Sometimes it’s essential to defy the fate bestowed from the heavens. Battle Against Damnation depicts such a fight.” (asami)

Battle Against Damnation will include four new tracks and will be mixed and mastered by engineers Mikko Karmila and Mika Jussila of Finland’s Finnvox Studio. The release’s cover art will be illustrated by David López Gómez and Carlos Vicente León. The above names have had experience working on Awakening From Abyss and expect to expand LOVEBITES’ sound and visual world further.


Debut release THE LOVEBITES EP also featured four tracks, and later saw these pieces reimagined for the band’s full-length album. Battle Against Damnation will not follow suit. Its contents will stand alone as the next part in the band’s expanding power metal arsenal.

In additional, LOVEBITES have just confirmed to be part of the Vans Warped Tour Japan 2018 line-up, alongside PROPHETS OF RAGE, KORN and LIMP BIZKET amongst others, and will perform on 1 April 2018. They will follow this up by playing their biggest headline show to date at Shibuya’s Tsutaya O-East on 28 June 2018

In July LOVEBITES will join Japan’s heavy metal heavyweights ANTHEM on tour. Then in August they become the first all-female metal band from Japan to perform at Wacken Open Air in Germany. LOVEBITES’ battle against damnation continues to grow stronger inside and outside of Japan.


Japan’s iron maidens, LOVEBITES, will perform on their biggest stage yet at Germany’s Wacken Open Air 2018, taking place between 2-4 August 2018. The band, one of Music Week’s ten acts on the radar for 2018, will be the first all-female metal act from Japan to perform at the event.

Founder and bass player miho comments, “Playing on stage at Wacken Open Air has been one of our dreams since forming LOVEBITES, and we’re thrilled for it to happen so soon after our debut album! Since this will be the first time in Wacken’s long history for a metal band formed of Japanese women to be on the line-up, me and the LOVEBITES members will do our best. We can’t wait to play in front of metal heads all over the world in Germany this summer! As we say in Japan; yoroshiku onegaishimasu!”

LOVEBITES debut album AWAENING FROM ABYSS saw Metal Hammer comparing its “blistering twin guitar salvos and soaring vocals” to the likes of Rage and Iron Maiden, and Kerrang! note that “DragonForce would be proud of such expert-grade guitar heroism”.

AWAKENING FROM ABYSS was released in Europe by JPU Records ahead of LOVEBITES’ first overseas festival appearance at London’s HYPER JAPAN – the UK’s biggest Japanese culture convention – and their headline set at The Underworld in Camden.