This week Norwegian techno band Nightcore released their first album since 2003. The band is best known for creating the musical genre Nightcore, and their newest album fits the genre by consisting entirely of sped-up anime theme songs. We sat down with Nightcore members Thomas Nilsen and Steffen Ojala Soderholm to discuss their new album.

“When we started our band we wanted to mix hard trance with Eurodance, but with a happy sound as opposed to the darker tone that most people in the genre tend towards. We’ve only released singles since 2003, and we heard that our music has spun out into an entire genre, so we wanted to see how people were influenced by our music and take that into account when we started work on a new album. So we looked up Nightcore on YouTube, and found that the genre seems to consist entirely of sped up anime themes.”

“Honestly, we’re not entirely sure how our name became synonymous with this kind of music, but we’ve embraced the style and called our album Japan Anime Song Collection Original Work Do Not Steal and the initial singles off the album are the Perfect Insider OP sped up 15% and the Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress OP sped up 25%. My personal favorite song off the album is the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure ED “Walk Like an Egyptian” sped up 50%.”

“When we started making this album we were worried about the legality of just speeding up songs and claiming them as new material. But we talked to our lawyers, and apparently slightly speeding up a song qualifies under fair use due to the fact that copyright bots can’t catch it and they’re the only ones who actually enforce copyright. We considered writing some new songs about the weird uncertain no-man’s land the internet is in terms of copyright, but we decided it was a lot easier to just speed up other people’s songs.”

At press time, all of the songs on Japan Anime Song Collection Original Work Do Not Steal have been uploaded to YouTube by users who have sped them up further and claimed them as their own work.

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