People sometimes ask me, “Maniac, how do you always find so much stuff?” And the answer to that is long and complicated! It helps to be connected with other people of like interest who are just as thoroughly going through the Idolverse on a regular basis — you can do a lot worse than to see what’s happening in the Idolmetal group on Facebook or follow friends in the These Are Also Good widget there to the right. It also helps to follow the crap out of idols on Twitter and scroll through the feed just as a matter of practice. Nobody knows idols as well as other idols, and you’re invariably going to be able to connect with something that you hadn’t seen before.

To whit! Last week, I saw a few mentions of this Yanase You person (Twitter), up to including this video:

Nice!

You is not exactly new; “WorldBreak” is her third single, and she’ll be celebrating her four anniversary pretty soon, holding her fifth one-man and the like; part of the reason that she flies under the radar a bit is that she’s based in Kyoto and almost everybody else in “the scene” calls either Tokyo or Osaka home.

Her sound isn’t entirely unique, but you could make an argument that You combines idol, neo-traditional and rock and -core and metal elements as well as anybody, as her second single demonstrates pretty well:

Or in another excellent example:

In fact, seeing this video, I remembered coming across You during my first forays into the idol world, looking for “more stuff like Babymetal” and of course coming up empty because only Babymetal is Babymetal, but I didn’t realize that at the time and got frustrated and wrote off a lot of what I saw then. Like You! Which is pretty unfair, because this is a very good song!

If you have some good info on You, please do share.