Isekai Stage formed in August of 2022 as an anime cover band with the goal of being able to perform at Anime Expo someday. They quickly accomplished that dream within a year and went on to play at the Santa Monica Pier for HoYoverse, Dodger Stadium for Hololive, Twitch Con, and out of state conventions.

While their success as a unit has caught them by surprise, their dedication to their craft gave them the building blocks to meet those opportunities head-on.

The band is composed of singer Noxigen, guitarist Xabier, and drummer R3M. R3M and Xabier had both been attending AX for years, while Xabier and Noxigen met while attending music school together in Hollywood.

The trio have played a number of conventions since their live debut at Anime Los Angeles in January of 2023 and their lead singer has even had the opportunity to perform on Fuji TV's Monomane the World. They’ve caught the attention of industry veterans like Flow and are working on their debut original EP planned for release in 2026.

We caught up with the band ahead of their headline performance at Plus Ultra Fest! – a My Hero Academia day to celebrate the final season with all proceeds being split between the Fire Poppy Project and CHIRLA – to chat about the series, their experiences, and where they want to continue to grow.

When did you first watch My Hero Academia? And what moment was it in the show that shifted it from a fun watch to a personal favorite?

Xabier: I think R3M is our My Hero specialist here.

R3M: I guess that's true. [I started watching when it was] maybe six or seven episodes deep. There were so many shows that were going on during that time and it was on our list. I think [my wife and I] were watching Re:Zero when I was like, you know My Hero Academia? We looked at the title but we didn't know much about it. I wasn't hearing anything specifically because this was a time where I was starting to watch anime. [I was] not aware of the way things are now. When you hear the hype for an anime that's gonna come out, everyone already knows before the first episode. I wasn't in touch with social media during that time to know that it was a great contender, nor did I read the manga. So I just went right in and I was like, oh, this is cool. For the lack of a better term, when I recommend it to non-anime people, I'm like, “It's like Japanese X-Men.”

By the time we started catching up, it was great! Then I started seeing some resonance with Naruto. Naruto season two was the Chūnin exams and My Hero season two was the tournament arc. There was this really cool formula thing that started ringing where I said, you know what? This is starting to be built really well. The way the foundations of the previous big three were starting to push and a lot of things started changing now. I was watching it as a fan of anime but at the same time, as time progressed and I paid more attention to the music, I was sucked in by the music and I was sucked in by the story. That led me to now. We're caught up and awaiting the next episode. We've watched the movies and it's good. It's a solid one, definitely, in our book. When I have a chance to recommend it to quite a bit of age ranges, if you like anime or if you like Marvel superhero stuff, try this out. Fan for sure.

Isekai Stage at Dodgers Stadium, July 2025

Which characters are your favorites and why are they important to you?

Noxigen: I think All Might's probably my favorite. I like the relationship between Deku and All Might.

Xabier: I think mine is Todoroki because I have a soft spot for jaded characters. His family history and everything resonated with some personal struggles of my own, that pressure being put on you by family. And he's just cool too so it's hard not to like him.

R3M: I guess I have two characters. The teacher, Aizawa, and then also Present Mic because both of them, you could say, they kind of ranged up through a lot of crazy things, being pushed to grow up and now teach these other generations how to be heroes when they themselves have had so many troubles and obstacles to overcome. Sometimes it's hard, when I'm thinking about things in the perspective of leading or teaching, you know, I'm a fresh dad. I'm trying to figure out how to teach my kid the ways of life and how to overcome obstacles when they eventually happen. That responsibility of being someone that everyone is looking up to and sometimes you might feel like you don't have the right answers or you might make mistakes, but you're still that face or that front. This is a person that was brought the label of a teacher, leader and a mentor. So those are the things I think about now.

And I've told this to the guys, that the character that actually is literally me is Mei Hatsume because she's the one with the tech quirk [and] I'm working on our equipment. Every single time, almost every other show, there's some type of upgrade. "Oh, I've made changes to your guys' audio for this," or the possibility of doing all that. It happens almost every other show and it's just funny for me to see that I'm like, yeah, I have the tech quirk, like, literally.

My Hero Academia has a lot of standout music, from iconic openings and endings to an impressive score by Yuki Hayashi. Which songs have had the biggest impact on each of you and what makes them so special?

Noxigen: I think it's the same answer for all three of us.

R3M: It is.

Noxigen: It's probably "Polaris," the opening [by BLUE ENCOUNT], because it was one of the first two or three songs that we played together as a band. Isekai Stage would not exist without that song. It is definitely the most salient song for us as far as My Hero is concerned. But I think after that, we've also gone ahead and played three other openings. We've played "Peace Sign," "Curtain Call," and "Bokurano." We like those as well. And, funnily enough, "Peace Sign" was also one of the few songs that was in our list of ‘we should definitely be playing these songs’ but then we didn't get to it until a couple years later.

Why did “Polaris” land with you guys so much to make it this driving force for the band?

Xabier: Mostly the musical style because when R3M and I were putting together the idea for what we wanted to do musically, at least for me, "Polaris" was a song that, since I was watching MHA when I was in music school, I always thought, this type of guitar playing and this type of rock music is the future to me. J-rock, to me, is the place where rock is really evolving on the world stage, so to speak. With my personal influences, and I think R3M and I share a lot of personal musical influences, I thought that was one of the first songs that we needed to try. Like, whoever can do the song is in the band. That was the same with "Zenzenzense" from Your Name. Those were the two songs where I was like, okay. If we can make this work, the band is gonna happen.

Actually, our first clip we ever posted was us playing the bridge from "Polaris" from our first rehearsal.

Isekai Stage performing “Polaris” by Blue Encount. Premiered on November 4, 2022.

R3M: I think when we were looking at ideas for the band, when I was watching the show, I was like, wow, “Polaris” [and] that season [are] just really epic. The Overhaul arc was insane for a lot of things that were going on. When we did the actual video, because these were our first videos to submit to conventions to attempt to play at events, I remember we recorded it and then Nox was going to lay down his vocals later. Xabier was like, “Hey, you're gonna see what's gonna happen when he puts his vocal on. He added a little extra something to it." And I was like, okay. And then when I got the track and I listened to it, he took the EK to another level and I was like, oh my gosh, this is gonna be great. This is gonna be amazing.

That segment that we put our own spin on has been the thing that a lot of people have gravitated towards. We were lucky to have recognition from the actual singer from BLUE ENCOUNT. That was really cool. I'm so glad it made it to him too.

If you were to create your own hero, what kind of power would they have?

Xabier: I always thought, if I could have any power, it would have to be instant teleportation. I just feel that's OP. There's so many useful things you can do.

R3M: I'd call it Copy Cat and the quirk would be the ability to analyze someone's movements or abilities and being able to instantly transmit the muscle memory of the skills of someone that they see and basically internalize it right away. If this hero was fighting against someone that knows really crazy karate moves, analyzes it [then] instantly now knows how to fight just like the style of whoever they're going against. In my sense, I'm like, it'd be cool for me to watch another really awesome drummer and then in five seconds, it just downloads into my brain and now I'm an awesome drummer.

Noxigen: For me, it would probably be the ability to be in multiple places at once because I think I like to do way too many things. It would probably be a clone thing where I can just clone myself and do a bunch of things in different places. I guess that could be a little villainous. A slogan could be something like, "I'm everywhere and I do everything."

Who is someone that's a real life hero to you?

Noxigen: My mom is my first and most prominent hero. I think I definitely tried to mold myself after her and every time, especially when I'm interacting with other people, I do feel like I approach it almost thinking, "What would mom say in this moment?" Just seeing how much, even just as a parent, to see how much she's evolved and been open to things, especially as being an Indian kid doing arts from India. I think [about] the freedom that she allowed for that and how much she had to go against things within herself and with the rest of tradition to support me the way she did.

Xabier: I would say my mom too. Sometimes I feel she's the only reason I'm still alive. She's the only person who's really been there for me for anything and supported me no matter the situation. Once again, like Noxigen said, doing anything art related, it could not be the first thing parents or family members would support, but when my mom never doubted me or my talent or my dedication.

I'd also say my best friend. He's a childhood friend and he's a musician, just like me. A guitar player. Growing up, we kinda had that shonen rivalry. Call it Goku/Vegeta, Naruto/Sasuke, whatever you want to call it. We grew up trying to one-up each other in a healthy way. Like, oh, you learned this song on guitar? I'm gonna learn it too. And let's play this, let's play that. That's something that, over the course of the years, has always stayed in our lives in a good way. We'd always been able to rely on each other and give each other really, really honest opinions. No BS answers like, oh yeah, you're doing great. Just keep doing you. Whenever there's constructed criticism, we've always been able to give that to each other and I think that's helped us reach the levels that we have in music.

R3M: One of the things that comes to mind is there's a lot of heroes that are solo, but there's a lot of duos like Batman and Robin. I'm gonna group it under two heroes that I would say work together to help me be what I am. Obviously, the first one will be my mom having so much support for me from the beginning. She said, if I ever have any child that's interested in music, I'm gonna support them in whichever way I can. It's still been that way to this day. It's been great to have somebody fortunate enough to lead me in the growth that I have. Part of that duo is [also] my wife. If I were to be honest, my portion, or the part of me that could have even made this band existent, couldn't happen without her. She designed the actual Isekai Stage logo. She's pushed me to do a lot of things. She supports a lot of what we do. We almost consider her like the CEO of us three in a sense. Those are two hard-hitting partners that have always been really, really important for what I do and what I continue to do.

You were all musicians prior to forming Isekai Stage. What kind of training have each of you had and have you adopted any new methods or techniques to strengthen your performances since coming together as a band?

Xabier: Nox and I went to music school in Hollywood, that's how we met, and we both went to the guitar program so we both have bachelor's in guitar performance. I was more self taught before I started music school. I played for, I want to say, a decade basically without any formal training so I played by ear and figured things out. And then I reached a point where I'm like, okay, I need to actually learn a more proper way to understand music than just playing guitar mindlessly.

I would say, even since graduating and starting the band, I don't have a rigorous practice regimen but I think [with] just the repertoire that we currently have, it's so demanding that pushing myself to play the songs properly has made me improve so much as a guitar player. Every time I'm playing a song, I have to think of how am I gonna hold the pick on this song? How's my left hand technique for this section? It just makes me think more of how I play, more than any other style of music that I've played before.

Noxigen: Like Xabier said, we met at music school when I moved here. I was in a music school prior in India which was a little bit more intensive where it was a place in the middle of nowhere. It was like Big Brother but music school. Every day, we'd walk to music school and then there would be a little apartment complex where everyone lived and that was cool because it was very intense training because that's all you did. You just woke up, went to school and played music until midnight and then came back and slept. That was the whole thing. That was very important. Before that, I had played guitar for a couple years and when I was a kid, I was classically trained in Indian classical music so that really helped.

I use a lot of those techniques when I'm singing Japanese music because one of the core elements of singing Indian classical music is that you're either singing in a language you don't know or you're singing a version of the language that nobody uses and is non-existent. It's using grammar and words that you can't really infer anything from. It kind of worked out that I could phonetically figure things out, leading to me being able to sing phonetically in Japanese for a while before I actually started learning the language. Even on the production side, I think learning how to write music like this and how to re-do music like this really helped my sense of music and how I listen to things and how I view things as a producer. That's how my background is and how it relates to the stuff that we do now.

R3M: I also started self-taught. For years, I didn't do any formal training for school until recently. I'm going to school right now actually and even the guys are telling me that [my] playing is getting a lot better and [I’ve] improved a lot. Going to school is actually making a bit more of the difference. It's pushing me more to get better and this band is pushing me more to get better all the time, not only with all the songs that we learn from all the anime and video games, but also the originals that we are starting to work on. We're starting to craft those ideas to make something that's organically us so that people can listen and enjoy and hopefully they do enjoy the new ideas that we bring up. It's definitely been a journey and I love having that hero mentality, like Midoriya, [where] you want to keep improving [and] surpass yourself again and again and again and again. And it's a never ending journey. I enjoy always looking for moments to improve when I can.

Your live streams have been a great way to both practice and engage with your audience. What have been some of the surprises – good or bad – since diving into the streaming realm?

Noxigen: It's been interesting because I think it's definitely made our live shows sound way better because the habit of getting together and playing is quite helpful. Who'da thought? But I think the live stream thing, honestly, it came as kind of an afterthought, but it's become our main way of recording things and main way of showing what we do to people. Even when I meet new people, I don't have to struggle to show videos anymore. I have all the highlights of our stream and I can literally be like, hey, if you want to hear something, just go to this channel on Sunday and then you can hear us. It's such a straightforward way to direct people to things and that's been nice. It's been a little surprising and it's been nice, but we also didn't expect a lot of our live stream videos to pick up an audience. I think that was very interesting to see. We tried a lot of produced videos because, in my day job, I work with a lot of camera people. I would try to use all my jutsus of film and TV production on our videos and what really worked was just putting whatever camera we had in front of us and just playing. Regardless of what the quality was, it seems like if we played well enough people gravitated. Not that we shouldn't or we're not gonna improve the quality of our streams look and sound-wise, but I think those have been the primary surprises and the good part of it.

I guess one negative is there's just so much writing to go through because some videos, if we stream on TikTok, there's so many chains of comments that are asking for songs. Sometimes, what'll happen is we either don't know the song or sometimes we just finished playing the song or it's a song that we've played before but we haven't played in a long time so none of us remember it. We run into small issues like that that can possibly be frustrating for people that are watching. A lot of the songs that we play do require a lot of upkeep because I think Japanese music has evolved to be incredibly technically demanding and it uses a lot of musicality to play. I think if certain songs don't have upkeep, it will just fall apart.

But, even then, I think it's been a great way to build our repertoire and honestly just get together and play and interact with the people that are listening to us. And honestly, the hang after is also pretty awesome because we always go get Frosties and we always make a thing out of the stream days. So that's become a ritual where we'll play a stream and then we'll go get a Frosty.

Xabier: It's basically that kind of thing where just being ourselves is what the world really accepted. It's something we're really thankful for. It's been a crazy year in terms of outreach and social media.

Who is responsible for the pop up style video commentary?

Noxigen: That's me.

What drove you to it?

Noxigen: At that point, I was trying things out because I saw a lot of creators start to do that where it would be a video of them in a rehearsal room. I took it from certain bands and artists that would do this type of promotion where they would overlay their single on top of rehearsal footage and then they just messed around and played with each other and made content that way. I think at some point I probably realized that we do that on stream already while playing live music, so I guess that helped. We have [what we] call it “the Sonic Incident,” because Xabier likes to play the Samsung theme during one of the Sonic songs. That was one of our first videos that got a lot of attention and I think I just managed to take the momentum from there and make more videos like that.

R3M: It actually evolved too because the captions were comical for a while. We were kind of burning ourselves or you could say laying jokes on ourselves in these captions, but then eventually we were listening to the comments of people in our videos. They were saying, "Where's the bass player?" Or we would be compared to characters or people that we resemble, so then we'd throw that in the comments and be like, we heard who you compare us to visually. That's totally fine. So we take those jokes that they put and we run with it and put them in the captions and they enjoy it too. We love having fun with the comments.

Noxigen: It even translated to live shows where I got Saitama so much that I was like, when we play our AX show, I'm just gonna be Saitama. I had to change in the middle of the set and it was so funny. When we run out of ideas, we like to take it from the comments sometimes.

Let's dive into your first original release, "Sacrifice." When did the ball start rolling on that? Which components came together first, what was after, and how long did it take to get from idea to release?

Noxigen: I think that's been in the works for like two years. I had a demo of it sometime in 2023. It was either the end of 2023 or early 2024. Everything was just the skeleton of the song and then we slowly started playing it more live. Now that I think of it, it's a song that evolved live because I think every time we played it, each of us would either alter our parts or each of us would iterate on the stuff that we played before. I think the last couple of times that we played it live, we figured out that, okay, now the song's complete. There's enough from all three of us to where it sounds like an Isekai Stage song and then we just re-recorded all our parts and then we put it up.

You've done several collaborations with other performers like Nabi Kim and Sienna Bella. You also have an original song coming out with Shihori soon. How do your collaborations come about?

Xabier: At the beginning, we didn't have much of a network so we just talked to people that we saw at cons. I think Nabi was our first collab and for that we played at Anifest in 2023. I got there earlier that day and I saw her singing. I think she was singing "Crossing Field" and "Blue Bird" and then I told the guys, like, hey, I think we need to collab with this singer. She's really good. Our first collab ever was "Idol" with her. Same thing with Sienna. We met Sienna at Anime Riverside.

Noxigen: We actually messed up her show because I think one of us stepped on one of the stage power supplies and all of her audio just went out. She had to reset a song or something. I met Shihori through a bunch of friends that I made. That was such a full circle moment for us because we actually met Shihori in a Houston show that we did randomly. Well, not randomly.

We knew of her and we knew that she was great and we saw her perform, but we randomly got to say hi to her at this barbecue place in Houston because all of our flights were delayed. So we were just cooped up in this barbecue place, eating, waiting to see what would happen to our flight. That was the first time we actually talked and then fast forward a year and a half later, we're playing with her. So that was a very nice full-circle moment and I'm very glad we got to do that.

Music means something different to everyone. What is it about music that has made this medium so important to each of you?

Noxigen: My perspective had always been, at the point that the band started – because I had just gotten a new job and I had made peace with maybe I'll just do studio work and maybe I'll not play live – and then Xabier, out of the blue, decided to put this project together. Playing music that was in another language that required a lot of new things to be learned, I think really gravitated me towards the medium of anime and Japanese culture in general. It became more important to me to know the culture and become more of a fan of the shows that I had previously just skimmed through or didn't pay too much attention to. It gave me a whole other appreciation for different types of animation and different types of composition and music and languages.

Xabier:For me, I think going back to the source of it, like why music? I think each of our brains are wired differently, and I think I just instinctively felt early on that I understood things better when it came through my hearing rather than visual or reading. It's not really a thought that I had back in the day, but I think that's just how I instinctively reacted to playing games or watching anime as a kid. I always knew that music left a big impact on me even before I made the decision to pick up an instrument or internalize the idea that I would even want to do music in the first place. I'll watch Digimon and then go to school, like third or fourth grade, and I'll be singing "Butterfly" in my head. I remember, at one point, I kind of made up what I thought the opening for season two would sound like in my head. So it was something that always kind of lived in me and I'm sure, for the people who feel this way, it probably has to do with how our brains are wired.

Noxigen: Yeah, for me, it was definitely a lot of that too. I grew up playing a lot of Japanese games too. Those soundtracks really did shape my music taste, regardless of how much I realized it at that point.

R3M: And a certain layer to combine this... In 2019, on New Year's Eve in Tokyo, I was at a Countdown New Year's Eve concert and one of the bands that played was Sambomaster, who's done some music for Naruto and a lot of other things. Now, there's some songs I recognize. They're a very legendary band, like Asian Kung Fu Generation. They had a big age range of fans. When they played a certain song I had never heard before, a slow ballad, very emotional, it sounded great. Honestly, I don't speak Japanese. I don't really understand much. There was a certain part where it got really emotional and there was a sudden stop in the song. It was completely silent and I started crying. The guy next to me, who was a Japanese local, was also crying. I was like, wow, that's crazy.

When I go back later to look at the name of that song called "Love Song," the lyrics actually speak about losing a loved one. Things we can't understand sometimes become transcendent for us to feel through music, whether we know the language or not. This was something that was a really key point that was motivative, I think, for me in this project – because we're still working on learning our Japanese – but there's so much where we feel that this music is transcending a lot of emotion into us. I feel that that's something that we put into our goals, into our music, and into our representation of these covers to bring the same energy that those artists would have brought if they were on stage next to people here in the States.

Xabier: It's what they say: it's the universal language. Breaks any barrier, culture, language. Everybody feels the same, regardless of where they're from.

Despite being a relatively new band, you've all had some pretty mind blowing experiences so far. What have been two moments, big or small, that have caused you to pinch yourselves on this journey?

Noxigen: I think the [Hololive] Dodgers show and the Santa Monica show that we did for HoYoverse were very, very cool moments for me.

Isekai Stage performing at the Santa Monica Pier with HoYoverse in 2023

Xabier: Yeah, I'd agree. I would also say the same day as Dodgers, we played AX this year. To me, that's been, energy wise, my favorite show with how people reacted. I think it's been our best crowd. We played really well that day and it meant a lot because one of the motivations for me, when R3M and I had the idea for the band, was that we just attended Anime Expo multiple times. We became aware of all the events and all the music that was happening around it. I think we both had this feeling of, I want to come back here next year in the capacity of a performer because I've seen what people do and I think I have something that I could bring to the community that could be of value. This AX really brought home that all the efforts are finally giving us fruits. I would say, for me, this year's AX was the top show.

R3M: I agree with Nox on the Santa Monica HoYoverse show because that show came about within only the first four to five months of us playing and putting out videos. So for someone like that to reach out, I was like, wow, really? This is insane!

I'm bouncing back on all the performances too for AX for the reason that, a month before the band started, because it started in '22 of August, I was working as an audio tech for the Beer Garden for AX so I saw a lot of really cool performers that I was helping with audio. On the last day, after the exhibit hall, you take those escalators and it tells you: "See you in 2023." I have a selfie picture of myself pointing to that sign and I was like, I don't know how I'm gonna get there, but I need to figure out how I'm gonna play AX '23. And then a month later, Xabier's like, hey, I have an idea for a band. The rest is history.

What goals are on the horizon for 2026?

Xabier: An EP release is definitely one of the main things we want to start out with, solidifying ourselves not just as the people who do covers, but the people who are also good enough to possibly have their music featured in shows or games in the future and leverage all the work we've been doing and all the presence that we have, as well as just expanding our live shows. We're gonna start the year playing at a festival called Yukibana in New Jersey. We have a couple international performances coming up which I don't know if we are allowed to talk about them or not but they will be happening. Those are the immediate things that we are definitely looking forward to next year.

R3M: Apart from performances, we're still growing. I was always telling the guys, I want to figure out cool activities or ways that people that want to interact with us, outside of cons, creating cool little get togethers or hangouts and just having fun with the people that have fun with the music we listen to or the music we play. Apart from being a musician, I always think about how much of a fan I am of certain artists and the cool things that they do to interact with the people that are fans of them. I don't know if I say we're at a certain level of that yet, but I think there's always a good way to become that kind of down to earth group of people. It's just like, yeah, we play music, but we can just hang and talk and building a community is also just as important. You know that yourself, gathering all these events and all these performers and vendors, etc. You, yourself, are also creating a community and that's one of the things that I think we're in the process of starting to either learn or trying to take pointers and seeing how we can create a community ourselves.

Xabier: The part of us that grew online was basically just us being ourselves. I think a lot of people resonate with that and they can tell that we're just chill people. We are talented, I don't think that's a secret and it's not a lack of humility to say that, but we know what it took to get to where we are and we're always open to being a beacon of inspiration for whoever wants to pursue anything similar to what we do. We're always open to any questions, making new friendships, anything. We try to be as approachable as we can, even though we're always running after every show because we have to pack the gear away and run to the car and then people don't get a chance to talk to us, but we are very open to interacting with everyone. If anyone reading this wants to ever talk to us, they can feel free to do so.

Noxigen: Maybe that's a goal for next year. Maybe we can have a cruise or something like that. Maybe something happens to where we end up having a crew and then we can actually interact with the people.

Xabier: Touch more grass.

Noxigen: A little bit more. But I think it's also equally important for us to grow our audience online too just to keep growing it because there's a lot of people. I mean, just looking at our analytics, it's crazy how many people we have listening from Japan, from Indonesia, from Brazil, from so many other places and I think us streaming has made it so that we are able to reach all these places at the same time. Hopefully next year we can also start putting pieces together to maybe go to those places and play. Fingers crossed a lot of the international stuff, at least a few international shows that we're working on, fingers crossed hopefully we go through and we can do it. The goal is to just keep going and see how much we can do and how we can evolve.

Interview: Isekai stage

Interview: Nekopuf