Let’s Discover Some Idols: Sugarpills

/ Homicidol Maniac

Well gang, I’m not sure if we’ll ever get to discover all of the idols worth discovering this year before the gate closes in a couple of weeks, so let’s expedite all of my personal favorites only the very best toward the front of the line.

A few weeks ago, while doing that thing where you look at the bills from random taibans for idols you haven’t heard of yet, and drawn like a moth to flame by the magic word “idolcore,” I went on a little riff through as-yet-unknown-to-me Osaka-area idols and found myself staring one act right in the face. Their name sounded kind of cutesy, but the limited photography of them didn’t line up with that. I figured, hey, part of why I’m doing this is to have something new to listen to for a little while, let’s see what it’s like. And oh my friends, what a good decision that turned out to be:

That’s Sugarpills, and on the strength of two whole songs they might be my favorite debut this year.

I’m sure that we could split some hairs about “this year,” but facts are facts and the group itself wasn’t active until early in 2020, and this debut single is indeed during This Great Year of Hell. And considering that there are only two recorded songs, even under pandemic conditions that suggests a lot of “new”:

There are a lot of idol tropes in that music, sure, but it’s much better executed than a lot of those groups, and “My First Idol Song” in particular has a super hook. Now if only I can help them get a few thousand more fans, maybe there’ll be occasion to make more music and make me happier! That should be easy, even without recordings idols are … what do you mean there’s like no video online and the best recent clip is this?

This one’s more recent and has much better sound quality, but also only two members:

Anyway, because I did my discovery here entirely by Spotify, I started off only hearing their work at its best, and so I didn’t have a second’s worth of befuddlement — I was immediately in love. That may unfortunately be all we have to go off of for now, but now you all who didn’t already do know about Sugarpills, and you can go to their web store and buy all of the things.