I haven’t smashed a Play button so hard and so fast in a long time as I did yesterday when YouTube actually sent me a timely notification for once, and it was for FRUITPOCHETTE’s new single on what felt like a slightly delayed delivery but who cares it’s motherhubbard FRUITPOCHETTE. Damn that was exciting. This is the one that they crowdfunded for, which is to say in part that it’s the first whole-on real-deal single since the OG group re-formed last year. It’s not exactly completely new to us — we even got to tease it a little while ago — but now that it’s here in the flesh and MVed, it feels real and alive and this opening shot of Mina just about made my heart stop:
Idol Metal
For pages and posts that relate to heavy metal music performed by idol groups.
This Is What AIBECK Sounds Like Now
It was with a heavy heart that I had to acknowledge, from a time of my not-quite demise, that AIBECK — somewhat-longstanding not-quite-doyens of the chika scene, gamely ambitious and well-supported — had a mass graduation and was now moving forward as a duo. It gave me a sad, especially at the thought that I wouldn’t be seeing my girl An’z around anymore, probably, and she was the first idol to ever tweet an English phrase back at me, which practically means that we were bound at the soul.
Nevertheless, idol never truly rests, and it was good and necessary that the resultant “new” duo version of the group would make good on a release in October. Maybe this is where we land today!
My Appetite for “Metal Galaxy” Is Not Sated, Babymetal
You may have noticed yesterday that Babymetal — the literal reason for the season, the thing that brought me here, still capable of being the most powerful entity in the universe — dropped another video in the run-up to the impending release of the extremely-anticipated Metal Galaxy album next month. I thought about just tossing a post into the ether in response, but no, friends, the Official Policy of Homicidols Dot Com is that Babymetal is supreme for a reason, and when a thing is supreme and also one of the only reliable cornerstones of the Legends category that sorts our content, that thing deserves more than a hastily scribbled ZOMG reaction. Let’s do whole paragraphs instead!
So the song is “Shanti Shanti Shanti”, which by the title alone would give away a certain touchpoint with the subcontinent; if you’re still unfamiliar, though, and you’re either personally South Asian or as personally adjacent as yours truly, you may find yourself surprised at how few non-Babymetal tropes are actually employed.
A New Kamen Joshi Thing Emerges
Actually, I’m not sure what’s even what anymore in the world of Alice Project. Other than throwaway references to graduations and goddamn tragedies here and there, I haven’t had a post dedicated to any part of the PARMS family in almost two years. It’s not even for reasons that you might suspect, either — the whole collective just seemed to stop doing new material, and though there was no shortage of stuff in their orbit, there was a shortage of what I really have this website for. So, ergo, no Alice Project.
And then this thing dropped out of the blue yesterday!
We Interview Idols: Broken By the Scream
Broken By the Scream is one of the most unique, talented and loud acts in alternative idol and, over this past Labor Day weekend, Saboten Con played host to their U.S. debut in Phoenix, Arizona.
Although harsh vocals in chika idol have been normalized over the past few years, most groups still only use death voice elements to provide an occasional emotional emphasis or shock. Broken By the Scream, however, has flipped this norm, embracing harsh vocals for the lead part in the majority of their songs. Having a dedicated screamer (Io) and growler (Kagura) also lends a signature contrast to the vocal delivery, oftentimes in a call-and-response style reminiscent of a collaborative rap. In this harsh environment, it is the entry of the clean vocals of Yae and Ayame that oftentimes serve as a purifying and cathartic shock.
Towards the end of Saboten Con weekend, Team Homicidols was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to sit down and speak with the four talented idols whose singular voices combine to make Broken By the Scream the vocal powerhouse that it is.
Yae: This is a genre that you’ve probably never heard anywhere else in the world.
Broken By the Scream Breaks the States
Broken By the Scream made their debut performance on U.S. shores this past Friday night at Saboten Con in Phoenix and it was spectacular. Ayame, Yae, Io and Kagura brought a ton of energy to the Arizona desert and left it all onstage. The vocals were appropriately brutal and angelic in turn, the choreography crisp and emotional. Fans had flown in from across the U.S. and up from Mexico to give BBTS a proper welcome to the West. Altogether, it was a fabulously brutal evening.
【アメリカ初公演無事終了!!】
The first performance in America was a great success! Everything was great!
Thank you America!! pic.twitter.com/xWiV0OPjUk— Broken By The Scream (@BBTS_koushiki) August 31, 2019
Broken By the Scream Drop New MV and Album Release Date in Lead Up to U.S. Debut
Broken By the Scream will set foot on American soil for the first time in just under three weeks unleashing their kawaii-meets-deathcore stylings on a live crowd at Saboten Con in Phoenix, Arizona. Because the one thing hype needs is more hype, BBTS also dropped a couple of bombshells over the weekend:
【最新MV「アイハキミノモノ」公開!!】
PS4『お姉チャンバラORIGIN』テーマソング「アイハキミノモノ」Full Ver.を公開!! https://t.co/sUtoPBm4jp◇本楽曲収録の2nd Album「Noisy Night Fever」は2019.10.09発売!! 各CDショップにて予約受付開始!! pic.twitter.com/bVS2uWBOgC
— Broken By The Scream (@BBTS_koushiki) August 10, 2019
- The release date for their second full album, Noisy Night Fever;
- And the MV for “Aihakimino”, the theme song for the upcoming PS4 game “Onechanbara Origin”.
Let’s Crowdfund Like Hell for FRUITPOCHETTE!
If you Weekender, you know that I keep up with Azuma Shiori fairly often (even if I don’t really understand it), ex and current and nominal leader of metal-as-hell Ehime-based duo FRUITPOCHETTE; what I’d be doing instead in a just world is dedicating that energy to the actual project that she co-fronts, except that FRUITPOCHETTE, despite coming back to life and filling me with glee about it, has been pretty quiet since the re-launch, and I thought that they were probably taking the whole “this is part-time” thing extra seriously — maybe you could catch them playing the old hits on a weekend, or at a festival or something.
And maybe that was true until a couple of days ago, when — bam! — out comes the crowdfunding effort that you and I and everybody we know absolutely must get behind:
💫 拡 散 希 望 💫
この度FRUITPOCHETTEは
再結成後1周年を機にクラウドファンディングに挑戦します！！ファンの皆さんとFRUITPOCHETTEで
ひとつになりチャレンジしたいです。https://t.co/63zh9uKAi4⚠️クラウドファンディングの挑戦は7/28 18:00から始まります。
後日詳しい詳細告知します！ pic.twitter.com/NJUorEDX5k— FRUITPOCHETTE 公式 (@fruitpochette2) July 23, 2019
Basically, in honor of their first anniversary since reunification, the idea is to fund a new single, an MV for that single, and a nationwide release tour. It opens on Sunday. Let’s give them all of the money! Continue reading
JyuJyu and the Unsettling Summer Single
This post, you guys, I’ll tell you: I started this the day the following MV (spoiler alert!) dropped, and wrote ~most of the~ post before being called off to something else. No big deal, I thought, I’ll wrap it up tomorrow. Days later I finally remembered what was up (such is life nowadays) and I was going to CYA and put the thing into the Weekender.
What stopped me?
It’s too damn good, that’s what.
So without too much further ado: JyuJyu, not at all still reeling from the hyper-contrived nontroversy with Chunpi, are releasing a new single, and doing so in collaboration with Tenma from URBANGARDE, which is a sentence that’s always a joy to write. Watch as styles collide less heinously than you might expect, and idols whose whole angle is being cursed and doomed rip off maybe the best song of the summer: Continue reading
And Now Babymetal Is Officially Back
Now that it’s completely official, the team of moralists and ethics professors here at Homicidols Dot Com can finally talk out loud and with full candor about the second single dribbled out by Babymetal in the lead-up to their first album in three years. Yeah, we usually don’t care all that much about leaks (especially not “leaks”) in a moral sense — it’s more a “let’s see this the way it’s meant to be seen maybe” thing — but in this case it felt appropriate to hold up a minute and let the chips fall.
It’s been a weird 18 months for Babymetal fans, but as if there were any doubt after “Elevator Girl”, this latest one is as definitive and clear a statement as you’ll get that the greatest show on earth is ready to smash some skulls in as fun a way as possible:
You can do the buy/stream thing here: Continue reading
