In the interests of keeping things light and good while at the same time rushing to get out a few more of these Let’s Discover Somes before we get the ball rolling on Best Of voting in a few weeks, I thought it was good to return to not just easily one of the best debuts this year, but definitely the most prolific and absolutely the one who I’d already done the most drafting (and therefore least work now) for!
Yes, friends, at some point in the past several months, if you’ve been active in just about any idol lists, you’ve no doubt run into who is probably the most enthusiastically multimedia of all non-major idols in quite some time, almost certainly via one of their umpteen videos:
Yeah, that’s NELN (Twitter), and they’re awesome.
Obviously, this is a group that’s stylistically all over the place, ranging from “oh that’s just a nice normal ballad kind of thing” to “if I didn’t know any better, I’d swear this is basically a very sparkly screams-bereft PassCode.” I can appreciate any group that can do dance tunes and city pop and all that, but I’m mostly here for the hard stuff myself, so while I am quite taken by these relative newcomers, my guise of Professional Maniac requires me to hold back on them just a tiny bit because this website is, of course, all about the hard side of idol and that’s not something that NELN is quite sold out to. And that’s cool! Good for them. I will quietly love what they do and publicly skip the things that maybe don’t fit so well.
This is their latest, which is days old:
Which of course comes complete with its own self-reaction video and I think another version of it just this morning
Just quality all up and down the line with these ones. The race for Debut of the Year is a very interesting one, isn’t it?
The creative team behind NELN is also very interesting. NELN’s creative producer is Chiori Morioka (@moriokachiori). With her production company ‘Cloudy’ (https://clou-d.com/category/works/), she’s directed hundreds of music videos over the last 10 years. Working with artists like Silent Siren, RYUTist, 桜エビ〜ず/ukka, ゆるめるモ, avandoned, etc. Morioka has also worked on a similar project before, when 桜エビ〜ず/ukka did a ‘1 song per month’ concept in 2018 and she was their MV director. NELN’s music producer is Shinnosuke Nakasone (@mshi16), who composed Saraba Kana by BiSH.
NELN have shown a lot of potential so far, easily my favourite debut of the year.
This is great info to share, thank you!