All right, let’s get back to Discovering Some Idols, shall we? I feel kind of badly that more than a few of these groups that I’ll wave in front of your face did in fact debut at points in the past and some of them are pretty good so they’re never be eligible for the kinds of major awards that can make or break an idol career, but that’s okay. We’ll enjoy ’em on their merits anyway!

And what merits! Friends, I introduce you to AKIARIM (Twitter), who are … okay, so you know how there was this global outbreak of a potentially-deadly-and-even-under-the-best-of-circumstances-difficult-to-treat pathogen and, you may recall, it kind of got a whole lot of things canceled in the early parts of 2020? Yes, like almost a year ago? Okay good. So that’s basically AKIARIM, who if I’m following the timeline correctly were like, hey, we’re a cool group with some talent behind us and some resources and we’re debut– well okay, let– WE’LL JUST DO IT LATER THEN. And so began their life in earnest a few months ago:

This was the one that grabbed me:

Have mercy

I mentioned the talent — which is obvious anyway — because of the following names that I’m going to float out there as ex- associations, and I’ll just let you react: FLOWLIGHT, Shuuengo Buppan, Gacharic Spin (in case you forgot about Gachapin’s dancers). It’s pretty obvious that they have a good bit going for them! So let’s see where it lands now that they’ve released yet another MV from their debut EP:

Like this group.