When NECRONOMIDOL teased this MV … good lord, was that just yesterday? yesterday, I was a tiny bit skeptical, I’ll admit. Long right in my personal tippy-top group of favorite things in music (let alone idol, but also and especially idol), Necroma felt almost inviolable, and so the big membership upheaval from earlier in the year was actually kind of hard to reckon with, and I feel like I’m still getting used to the idea. But, that being said, just as life turns to death and death to decay, all things must change, and that includes an idol group that personifies the living darkness! And so, when the thing dropped a little while ago, I held on and …

Oh hey, this is good! And of course so — Ricky didn’t suddenly stop knowing what to do when the last of the OGs left, of course the core concept and ability to meld talent to it are still there, so what the hell was I worried about? No, man, if you dig on Necroma, you’re going to dig on this. It’s just, like, a lot more gruesome than you might be used to!

I mean, with a name like “santa sangre” you’d pretty much expect what you got

I wanted to relate a more measured reaction to this MV, but instead I’m trying to think of good ways to judiciously and tastefully pass around praise. Ricky as director? Nice job. Himari as center? Star. Himari’s hair still at Rapunzel-like copiousness? Check and mate. The newbies acquitting themselves well? They make excellent madness-driven murder victims in what’s either a very dark metaphor or just someone thinking in terms of a Fauci movie! And as for the song, I am not ashamed to admit that I let myself wonder just for the fleetingest of moments if this wouldn’t be — to people ignorant of the Japanese language at least — Necroma’s first real radio song, a pleasing neo-alt-pop bop that could have scored a few minutes on MTV back in the day, but then that moment passed and I heard, like, all of the actually not-at-all-cheery things going on in there, from chord changes to tempo, and yeah, it’s a suitably creepy entry into the upper half of the group’s fairly significant corpus.

So good work! Do more stuff! And then when the pandemic finally lifts and we can all get back to our ~normal~ lives, come back to the United States and do some gigs that are easy for me to get to!