The official Twitter account of Bocchi the Rock anime celebrated the 10 million view milestone for Kessoku Band’s lyric video of “Guitar to Kodoku to Aoi Wakusei” on November 9. The video made the achievement in about two months after it was posted on November 6, 2022 on YouTube. The post surpassed 1 million views on the platform in four days on November 10. It’s currently the most-viewed among Bocchi the Rock related videos on Aniplex’s YouTube channel.
Kessoku Band is composed of four members: Hitori Goto (Yoshino Aoyama) as the lead guitar player and lyric writer, Nijika Ijichi (Sayumi Suzushiro) as the drummer and frontman, Ryo Yamada (Saku Mizuno) as the bass player and composer, and Ikuyo Kita (Ikumi Hasegawa) as the guitar player and vocalist. The band performed “Guitar to Kodoku to Aoi Wakusei” in the anime’s fifth episode. ZAQ wrote the lyrics with music by otoha, arranged by akkin.
The song is compiled in the band’s debut album “Kessoku Band,” which was released on December 28, 2022. The CD product topped three rankings on Oricon’s sales charts, and according to Billboard Japan, the band sold over 73,244 album copies and topped their Top Albums Sales charts as well.
Their live-performance was also posted on YouTube along with the lyric video and it garnered more than 4 million views so far.
CloverWorks animated the 12-episode-long Bocchi the Rock anime, which aired from October to December 2022, based on Aki Hamaji’s 4-koma manga of the same name. The manga has been serialized in Hobunsha’s monthly magazine Manga Time Kirara Max and released the fifth compiled volume on November 26, 2022. The anime released the first Blu-ray and DVD volume on December 28, 2022.
Crunchyroll streamed the anime and describes the plot as:
Hitori Gotoh, “Bocchi-chan,” is a girl who’s so introverted and shy around people that she’d always start her conversations with “Ah…” During her middle school years, she started playing the guitar, wanting to join a band because she thought it could be an opportunity for even someone shy like her to also shine. But because she had no friends, she ended up practicing guitar for six hours every day all by herself. After becoming a skilled guitar player, she uploaded videos of herself playing the guitar to the internet under the name “Guitar Hero” and fantasized about performing at her school’s cultural festival concert. But not only could she not find any bandmates, before she knew it, she was in high school and still wasn’t able to make a single friend! She was really close to becoming a shut-in, but one day, Nijika Ijichi, the drummer in Kessoku Band, reached out to her. And because of that, her everyday life started to change little by little…
Source: Official Twitter, Official YouTube
© Aki Hamaji / Hobunsha, Aniplex