Mrs. GREEN APPLE in 2025: Why Lilac Dominated Japan’s Mid-Year Charts

Japan in mid-2025 sounded like a rush of bright guitars and clattering snares coming from every cafe speaker and karaoke booth.

“Lilac” wasn’t merely big, it was the gravity well pulling other songs into its orbit: No. 1 on Billboard JAPAN’s mid-year Hot 100 with a points total roughly 1.5× the runner-up, while ranking No. 1 in streaming, video, and karaoke inputs on the composite chart; Mrs. GREEN APPLE also led Top Artists and their album ANTENNA topped Hot Albums.

Mrs. GREEN APPLE ‘Lilac’ single cover - black loafer filled with lilac flowers on purple. © 2024 UNIVERSAL MUSIC LLC / EMI Records Japan — Mrs. GREEN APPLE ‘Lilac’ single cover – black loafer filled with lilac flowers on purple. `© 2024 UNIVERSAL MUSIC LLC / EMI Records Japan`

Oricon’s half-year list pushed the point home: “Lilac” finished No. 1 on Combined Singles with 970,816 points, the first digital-only track to top that chart.

Amazon Music’s H1 round-up crowned it overall and in J-POP and ANIME, with six MGA tracks inside the overall top-10.

On the ground, DAM reported “Lilac” as the most-sung song of the half-year.

The run started a year earlier. Released 12 April 2024, “Lilac” arrived as the opening theme to MAPPA’s baseball drama Oblivion Battery (TXN, 10 Apr–3 Jul 2024), an appointment cue, thirty seconds of melodic sprint, telegraphing big moments every week.

It first hit No. 1 in July 2024, returned in September, and barely left the top five into year-end.

A winter TV double, Japan Record Awards Grand Prix, and a Kōhaku medley, reset the song for 2025, where it topped the Hot 100 five more issue weeks inside the mid-year window.

By late June, the RIAJ had logged Diamond streaming certification for “Lilac” (and Platinum for downloads earlier in spring).

Oricon wrote up the anomaly: a year-plus run inside the weekly top-3, the sort of line you usually reserve for evergreen karaoke staples, not a recent anime tie-in.

What you hear is motion: the opener’s staccato riff feels like a lead-off steal, then the chorus blooms with stacked harmonies that lift without a sugar rush.

Co-arranger Singo Kubota (Jazzin’park) helps keep the rhythm section buoyant while Motoki Ōmori’s lead vocal flashes between soft-focus and stadium reach.

As Mikiki put it, “テクニカルなパートが悪目立ちすることが一切なく” – the tricky guitar figures never jut out; they carry the mood.

The lyric threads through bruises and forward motion—“雨が降るその後に緑が育つように”—a sports-season arc reframed as a life one.

On screen, director Hidenobu Tanabe floods the frame with lilac hues, kinetic dolly shots, and tight performance cuts, the band looking straight down the lens like they’ve got a ninth-inning rally in their pocket.

The picture swept MTV VMAJ 2025 with Video of the Year, Best Group Video (Japan), Best Art Direction, and Best Cinematography.

Once Oblivion Battery wrapped, the song broke free of anime fandom.

Amazon’s lists show it thriving beyond otaku ecosystems; DAM’s half-year press note even highlights how a “difficult to sing” melody became a badge-of-honour challenge in booths.

On Reddit’s r/anime, spring 2024 threads welcomed MGA back to OP duty (“they still got it”), while r/jpop spun out typical joys, hook, message, the way Ōmori parks a cathartic line at the end of a phrase.

There was friction, too: a well-traveled r/japanesemusic post framed MGA as “too pop for rock,” a reminder that their mass success unsettles purists.

Karaoke data cut across those divides; JOYSOUND age-brackets kept placing “Lilac” near the top through H1 2025.

The backdrop wasn’t spotless. In June 2024, the band pulled and apologised for the “Columbus” MV within hours after criticism over colonial and racist imagery; Ōmori posted a detailed statement, and the label acknowledged “expressions that lack an understanding of history and cultural context.”

The episode kept the group in the headlines; “Lilac,” with its open-armed message and clean visuals, became the consensual centre of gravity for a very public year.

Momentum in 2025 came with scale. The 10th-anniversary campaign landed the best-of 10 on 8 July, then 100,000 fans over two nights at Yamashita Pier for the FJORD shows, followed by a five-dome autumn run (BABEL no TOH).

All roads pointed back to “Lilac”: playlist tops, set-list explosions, algorithmic afterglow.

So why did it dominate mid-year? Three engines firing at once.

A weekly anime cue turned into a country-wide sing-along; a sleek, award-magnet video gave it a face; karaoke habit and platform curation kept it in circulation long after promo.

Add a celebratory anniversary cycle and you have a modern Japanese hit built to last, measured in streams and sung in rooms.