NO MARK’s Closing the Year Strong

/ Homicidol Maniac

This is one of those things that I mentioned in the Weekender, a too-good-for-passing-mention from earlier in the week that I nonetheless didn’t get a chance to do anything with because fml anymore, yet here we are with a dreary Saturday and me sans other obligations for a hot minute. New post! And it’s about NO MARK!

Who, if you’ll recall, are fun and good, so this note about their releasing an album soon is worth getting hype over:

But all the more so because it comes complete with its own promo MV!


The live-shot, for when you have an intern’s budget and the needs of a manager

Yes, NO MARK is part of 2018’s glorious class of debutantes. Yes, I also had them pegged for maybe coming out of the gate a little bit stronger. It’s all good! To release an album so soon after officially starting, as a chika act, bodes well. As well as having like 400 followers can, at least!

I also love the implication that they’re doing an idol vs. idol battle against themselves:

All of this did get me going over their feed a bit, and it’s interesting how the chika set has morphed in the last couple of years. I haven’t been tuned in for long enough to gauge whether acts from, say, the big blow-out in 2012, or the debutantes of 2014’s breakout year, are still chikaing with the kind of gusto that people paid in photo fees and a cut of t-shirt sales can muster. All I know is that, since I first started to follow the scene closely in 15-16, the names and faces in the middling rungs of Shibuya and Shinjuku and Akiba — to say nothing of Osaka or Nagoya — have changed enough that one could be forgiven for seeing a completely different scene than what was happening back then. Some acts survived and are headlining, or have approached something like a national following, or are just the scene’s grand dames; others flitted out of existence.

So when we go to keep score at this time in 2020, who’ll be standing from this class? Or the also-good 2016, a good portion of whom are still with us in one form or another? Will NO MARK be the loud punk rock underground act that just keeps churning? Will they have morphed? Who’ll be on top? It’s actually the completely opposite of fun to think about!