Former Hitsujibungaku drummer Hiroa Fukuda has made his first public move since leaving the band at the end of 2025. He opened an X account on September 1st and posted a call for musicians to form a band influenced by shoegaze, post-rock, and alternative rock.
Introducing himself as Hitsujibungaku’s ex-drummer, Fukuda wrote that he is accepting enquiries by DM or email.
ex羊文学のドラマーフクダヒロアですXを始めましたシューゲイザーポストロックオルタナティブロック等に影響を受けたバンドを組みたいですご連絡はDM又はメールにてお受け付けしていますhiroa.fukudadrums@gmail.com pic.twitter.com/Tt0LdZwzJP
— フクダヒロア (@HiroaFukuda) September 1, 2026
Responding to an enquiry from Natalie after the post began circulating, Fukuda said he had already received a large number of messages and is still welcoming band invitations. No other members, project name, or timetable have been announced.
The sound he’s after links back to the music that drew him into Hitsujibungaku. Speaking to Fender News in 2023, Fukuda said the band’s combination of alternative rock, shoegaze, post-rock, indie rock, and odd metres appealed to him because they were all genres he had already explored himself.
Asked in 2020 to name the song most important to his life, Fukuda chose American Football’s ‘The Summer Ends’, recalling more than a year at high school when he wanted to be in a band but couldn’t find one, and spent the time at Shimokitazawa venues including ERA and BASEMENTBAR. It was during that period that someone introduced him to US indie, and to American Football, a band known for combining emo and math rock. He also began listening to alternative and post-rock, and it was working out what kind of music he liked that he has called the biggest turning point of his playing career.
Fukuda named DIIV’s ‘Human’ as an influence on his drumming days before the December 2020 release of ‘POWERS’, the band’s first album for a major label. He cited Colby Hewitt’s minimal drum riffs and low, dry snare sound, and pointed to ‘mother’, ‘Sabaku no Kimi e’, and ‘1999’ as songs where he had absorbed those ideas into his own playing.
His route into Hitsujibungaku also ran through Twitter, before it was renamed X. While he was playing support drums for Regal Lily as a teenager, footage of him caught Moeka Shiotsuka’s attention and she contacted him by DM. The two first met at a studio at Shinjuku JAM, and Fukuda joined in November 2015. “If I hadn’t been on Twitter, we probably wouldn’t have met”, he said in 2020. Bassist Yurika Kasai joined in 2017 after answering the band’s own public member recruitment on the same platform.
Fukuda went on hiatus from Hitsujibungaku in May 2024 to focus on his condition, and his departure after around ten years was announced on December 30th 2025. Shiotsuka credited his “beautiful drum phrases” and distinctive presence with carrying the band as far as they had come, and said she was glad to hear he intended to keep making music.
