Featured Image: REIRIE.

500 Weekenders published over the course of 500 consecutive weeks.  If you do the math, it works out to just over nine-and-a-half years. That is nearly a decade of spending Friday nights digging through the dark, chaotic, endlessly weird and wonderful corners of the alternative, indie, and underground idol scene to deliver this synopsis each Saturday morning.

When The Weekender first started, groups were disbanding and re-emerging in new formations and under new names faster than we could keep track of, and most of the MVs were live performance clips and badly lit dance videos that looked and sounded like they were shot on a toaster. 

Nothing has changed.

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Featured image: Ringwanderung. 

Summer rolls on with a flurry of activity and overseas idol events, including:

pinponpanpon are back in the US and causing mayhem. Today they are in Chicago for Summersmash. They have also announced an unofficial Anime Expo after party in LA for July 3rd.  That is shaping up to be quite the weekend as YURAPICO and You’ll Melt More will be performing at and around AX as well.

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Featured Image: diig.

As we ease into summer, things are starting to move at a slower pace. We didn’t see a ton of new releases this week, but what was delivered was decidedly good. We did get some some huge news on the overseas live front (just below) as well as well as in the Oshifound Corner, so be sure to read all the way to the bottom.

First up:

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Banner image: ki.o.ku.  

It’s the last Weekender of May and it seems like Idol Summer is off to a slow start this year. Usually, by now, the summer MV season has been officially kicked off (typically by a bikini-clad Niji no Conquistador) and we have begun the annual hunt for the Song of the Summer. Instead, it was left up to freshman unit ki.o.ku to get the ball rolling with their MV featuring a pensive trip to the beach with their bedroom furniture (see below). We appreciate them picking up the slack for their seniors.

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Banner image: Shihatsu-Machi Underground. 

Whew! Just four posts away from hitting 500 consecutive Saturdays of Weekenders, the streak was almost broken this morning. I am traveling for my niece’s Junior High School graduation (this whole preamble was supposed to be about the stark difference between these graduations of joy versus the devastating ennui of idol graduations we are typically subjected to).  Unfortunately, the wifi at the Airbnb was not working last night so I was faced with the prospect of trying to ccompose this post on my phone or breaking our 496 week-long streak. Luckily, the wifi finally kicked in this morning, so I am rushing to finish this and get it onto the interwebs before it fails again. Streak saved!!

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Banner Image: MADOROMI. 

Maybe something’s in the water? This week saw a lot of releases incorporating more mature themes than usual. There’s murder, suicide, disturbing imagery, lots of skin, and idols gazing into each others eyes like they are more than friends. On the MPAA spectrum, we are definitely closer to the R side of the ratings scale than PG-13. Basically, be careful pursuing  this edition of the Weekender at work.

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Banner Image: PSYCHOdelic. 

It was a pretty normal week in the world of underground, alt, and indie idol which, upon reflection, made me sad since it was also the week of ASP’s last live. When Watanabe announced the end of WACK and dissolution of all of it’s groups over the course of 2026, I assumed we would be in for 12 raucous months of noisy endings. Instead, a little over four months into the year, the members of ASP are deleting their social media accounts and vanishing with a whisper. 

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Banner image: NARUKAMI. 

I am on the road this week and compiling the Weekender on a cranky laptop with sticky keys and an ailing monitor. Please take any random typos or errors as reassurance that the compilation of The Weekender is one of the few remaining recurrent, web-based features yet to be turned over to AI. We here at Homicidols dot com still deliver 100% fully organic written content via a vintage hybrid parallel processing system known as the human brain. Enjoy the imperfection.

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Banner image: Jiemei. 

Welcome back to another week in the idol trenches. As we know, there’s not a lot of money in chika idol these days, so I doubt any of you arrived here expecting a slew of high-budget, narrative-driven cinematic MVs this week. This is good! Because almost every single music video that dropped in the last seven days is a performance, dance, or live MV. So, this week’s theme is all about the “authentic” live idol experience and/or demonstrations that our favorite units can, in fact, move in sync. But first:

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