Funny. I take out time the other day to sort of off-handedly complain about this being a boring stretch for idol, typically, as the winter festival season dries up and the talent gets into the meat of the academic calendar … and the last couple of days are just riddled with fresh new music and updates and things that warrant actual by-the-gods excitement. This being a holiday in the United States, I, uh, actually need to do Day Job work, so this is the last entry for today, but my goodness, have you guys heard the new one from Marionet yet?

Holy hell, who wrote this song? This is the kind of number that took me from Western Guy Who Likes Babymetal And Also Got Into BiS And Stuff to Western Guy Who Likes Idol A Whole Lot, like something I’d have run into when listening to the likes of Sakura Gakuin and GEM and Mecha High several years ago, all brightness and joy and idol wrapped up in a package full of cool old J-rock moves and, I swear to you, you put tinkling piano keys in the midst of an otherwise straight-ahead rock ballad and I turn to jelly.

What a nice track. I want to go see Marionet live just so that I can do a handshake line with the members and manager-san and whomever else and thank them for putting me in the sunniest of moods without even trying.

Considering how late it the year they joined up, and how off to the side they seemed compared to some contemporaneous debuts (looking in the direction of ZOC and Kimi no Mawari in particular), it’s great to see how steep a trajectory Marionet has set for themselves in these immediate postnatal months of theirs. There’s a good bit of material, and it’s all good, and they’re clearly wracking up fans. Keep a sharp eye on this one, team. I personally couldn’t be rooting for them harder, largely because the idea of Fumimi becoming a star tickles me pink.