And Thus Goes Ladybaby Gentle into That Good Night

/ Homicidol Maniac

The other night, as you know unless you do in fact currently live under a rock or perhaps spend your energies elsewhere, LADYBABY had their final live. Folks have been responding to it and reacting to it and writing about it and doing that whole thing, as is appropriate, but I felt like the whole thing really was best summed up in a few official photos:

It wasn’t enough to just go out with a farewell one-man, though; they gave us one final parting MV, and while it’s usually trite to even think the phrase “saving the best for last,” you’ll be hard-pressed to convince me that it isn’t exactly the case here:

Sakes! I gotta be honest with you, Ladybaby — I kind of wish you’d been doing more stuff like this over your Gen2 run. This is music that I (genuinely) get out of bed for and add to workout playlists and send to friends to listen to and then tell those same friends they’re dorks with terrible taste if they don’t fawn all of over it. Hell, there’s more creativity in just this one composition than you see in the entirety of most taibans. Well done. And if those writing credits are to be believed, Emiri has as much a future as a musical multi-hyphenate as does Rie.

While a eulogy would be appropriate here, I don’t have it in me to do it real justice, so … sorry. But going back to their beginning, few groups captured Westerners with quite so much ease and aplomb, and while the shine eventually wore off the OG gimmick, LADYBABY as a total entity morphed and grew into something pretty unique. Even G1.5, with its Oomori Seiko collaboration, was way out in front of what a lot of people probably expected of them, and frankly they were able to get away with it because talent really does trump all. And just when interpersonal volatility between Rie and Rei looked to kill the project for good, it came back in a completely different guise and with a yet-again-updated sound to close things out as strong as the group had ever been. If you’d asked me in 2016 if I thought I’d write in 2020 that LADYBABY will hold a special place in loudol history, I’d have probably scoffed and made a comment about asterisks and footnotes; but here, now, they really did earn it.

So sayonara to you, LADYBABY. This scene won’t quite be the same without you. And ganbatte to the talents at your core who have a very bright future ahead of them.