I have a number of homicidols set up for real-deal notifications on Twitter, and it’s usually BiSH (who actually get what Twitter is for) that has a bunch of stuff in my feed when I get up in the morning. So seeing a few tweets from them early today wasn’t all that surprising.

But then the damn phone kept buzzing, like 20 times in the span of my drive to work, and I wasn’t surprised that it was BiSH, but I was surprised when I finally had a chance to run it all through the translator and see what was happening:

They’d done a countdown to a free download of their first track off of their coming-very-soon-now new album!

(Once again, my lack of Japanese is a killer. Ototoy likes BiSH and had the download available. Go ask them.)

I had called “All You Need Is Love” a hard callback to BiS’s “primal,” but “Primitive” here sounds like it’s in the same spirit — a total high-emotion rocker that’s as close to a straight punk ballad as an idolcore group is probably ever going to get.

I should probably save some of the arrows in this quiver for the inevitable album review, but hell:

It’s really great that the reconfigured sextet is giving the full membership more to do; the debut album was a little too Chitti-and-Aina heavy. They’re both great in their own respects, but Hug Me and Gumico did perfectly well in their spots and probably had bigger contributions to make (I had been a little disappointed that Atsuko and liNGliNG hadn’t been given all that much to do on “OTNK” and “All You Need Is Love”).

For “Primitive,” it sounds like everybody gets a little bit of solo time while the track is naturally led by St. Chitti and Aina the End, and they own the choruses in particular like the goddamn queens that they are.

And now for the … bad? I don’t want it to seem like a negative criticism, but one of the very first things I noticed about the instrumentation and vocal melodies was how very, very similar they are to a number of other -core songs of note.

Take for example Party Rockets’ (pre-GT) “Kasabuta,” which is not only on this site, but featured on the Ultimate Homicidol Playlist:

Also a great excuse to again share one of the most visually compelling videos you’ll ever see from one of these groups.

Again, I’m taking it as a negative; there is an upward limit on the number of chord progressions and melodic combinations that can be written, especially within genre conventions (even if you’re breaking genre conventions), and it’s not like it doesn’t sound great — it sounds very great! It’s just a thing that I picked out and kind of ran with and (stop talking or WACK will have you killed!)

Anyway. BiSH!