Yuma Koda revisits the cinema of his childhood on delicate ballad “ende”

It is befitting of the work of Koda to open with the closer ahead of his forthcoming debut album, Amid Kinos, out October 2 via Newhere Music. “It felt almost like an homage to the concept of end credits, the end credits of the old films I loved,” he tells BEST FIT. “In a way, I wrote this song almost like an ending theme, like the end credits after the curtain has closed. The other tracks were more about finding my way through different kinds of confusion and beauty.” Of the cinematic inspiration behind “ende”, drawn from the big screen, Koda cites Leos Carax’s Holy Motors – a French surrealist fantasy drama. But the cinema as a physical space in which people congregate to watch a film also greatly informed on the track. Koda spent much of his childhood in an independent movie theater run by his father, immersing himself in a wide range of films. Reflecting on this space and the moments he spent there are fundamental to the writing process. “Cinema is a very important place in my memory of childhood. The whole album concept is built around the two different cinema rooms in my father's theater, which showed very different kinds of films.” The lyrics reflect this nostalgia-routed co...