BABYMETAL’s Back. Tell a Friend.

Twelve months-and-a-day after sealing themselves away from the world, BABYMETAL have completed their restoration and announced their imminent return from hiatus.

Unfortunately, it looks like restoration didn’t include refurbishment of the Yuibot.

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Reader’s Best: Luna’s Top Ten Favorite Idol Songs of All time

Welcome to the first in our series of Top Ten Favorite Idol Songs as identified by you, the readers of Homicidols. If you haven’t summitted your list yet, it’s not too late. Just complete this Google form and let us know your thoughts. We will be publishing a few each week until we run out.

First up we have Luna, also know as LunaGeek on Twitter and Discord where he is known for his enthusiasm for WWI experimental helmets and multiple YouTube channels.  He’s an intriguing guy with a diversity of interests, so let’s see how that extends to his picks for favorite idol songs. Take it away Luna: Continue reading

Homicidols Best: Daemon’s Top Ten Favorite Idol Songs of All Time

Cal proposed this project some time ago. “Let’s all come up with our ten favorite idol songs,” he said. “It’ll be fun,” he said. It’s actually a pretty agonizing experience. Getting the list down to about 25 or 30 favorite songs isn’t too difficult, but whittling it down from there becomes extraordinarily painful. You can see that, in the end, I copped out and included an extra 10 songs that I couldn’t bear not to mention. I’m doing a terrible job at selling this, because the whole point of this intro is to try to talk you into going through the exercise yourself.  

Please complete this Google Form to tell us your ten favorite idol songs, and why.  Entries that are fit to print will be featured here on this very blog. The last thing we want is for Homicidols to exist as an echo chamber of Team’s crappy tastes and opinions (no matter how erudite and correct they may be), so please let us know what you think. Continue reading

Of Foxes and Fools: BABYMETAL News + An April Fools Day Round-Up

Another Fox Day aka April Fools Day has come and gone and we are none the wiser for the experience. As followers of idol units who regularly pull inexplicably unbelievable things on any given day of the week, April Fools Day is always a bit confounding. I mean:

  • Are RAY really releasing a chiptune single? (no)
  • Is Especia really reuniting after 4 years for an anniversary show? (yes, they are
  • Is this group for real?

(I honestly don’t know)

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The 50 Greatest Alternative Idol Albums of the Last Decade: #1 – 10

Here it is!! The final top ten in our countdown of the 50 Greatest Albums of the last decade. Be sure to let us know the albums you feel we were criminally negligent to exclude, and the punishment you think we deserve. We are collecting your feedback for our follow-up article: “Albums We are Awful for Leaving Off the Greatest Albums List”.

While we know that our imperfect process (and questionable taste) has overlooked some stellar albums and deserving units, we hope that you have still found the exploration worthwhile. I know I have enjoyed revisiting some classic albums that I haven’t listened to in years and even discovered a few new favorites. We may try the exercise again, perhaps with the “50 Greatest MVs”. If we do, we’ll find a way to incorporate community participation in the selection next time.

Without further ado:

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BABYMETAL Going on Hiatus Maybe

Anyone who has followed BABYMETAL for more than one minute knows that the one thing they love more than coming up with crazy new merch is posting cryptic tweets. Yesterday, they dropped a doozy:

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The 50 Greatest Alternative Idol Albums of the Last Decade: #41 – 50

When future music historians look back at the history of the genre the English-speaking world, for lack of a better term, generally refers to as “Alternative Idol”, the decade of 2010 to 2020 will be seen as foundational. Underground idol in Japan has been around since at least the late 90s, hard rock composers were penning songs for idol units in the mid 2000s, and indie idol has probably existed since the birth of the idol genre itself. However, it was the year 2010 when the momentum of disparate events would begin to coalesce and eventually define the broad genre we know and love today. That year’s creation and subsequent seismic success of BiS and BABYMETAL would inspire the formation of hundreds of punk and metal idol units. At the same time, the zeitgeist of the early 2010s independently birthed several other less prominent but just as significant influences. Bellring Girls Heart, You’ll Melt More, Especia and others emerged to embrace an edgier and more avant-garde approach to idol, crafting the sounds and sensibilities of post- and pop-punk, new wave, techno and progressive rock into something entirely new. These early groups inspired both creative composers and adventurous music fans to embrace independent and underground idol as an effective medium for expressing almost every subgenre of rock, hip hop and electronica. Over the past decade, alternative Japanese idol has grown into a world class laboratory for the creation of some of the most innovative music on the planet. Continue reading

BABYMETAL Unveil BxMxC MV, Best-Of Album and Other Elaborate Plans for their 10th Birthday

It all started simply enough. Around midnight Tokyo time, BABYMETAL dropped an MV for “BxMxC”, their nu-metal banger that was exclusively released as part of the domestic (Japan) version of METAL GALAXY almost one year ago today. While BABYMETAL have been feeding us performance videos on the regular, we have to go back almost two years to the release of “Starlight” for the group’s last true MV, and all the way back to 2016’s “KARATE” to see an MV featuring the members themselves. This made it a brutally refreshing departure to see SU-METAL literally spit fire in this Mortal Kombat meets 8 Mile mash-up. 

 “BxMxC” is now available digitally worldwide.

Shortly thereafter,  they also released a BxMxC special edition t-shirt which sold out in about three seconds so don’t even bother searching for the link. But if you still feel an itch to spend money on BABYMETAL, they got you covered. Just a few hours later, they dropped the motherload: Continue reading

In Honor of BABYMETAL, a BABYMETAL Thing

So you’ve probably seen the news, that BABYMETAL, who through no fault of their own have had their entire reason for being (big-ass live shows) ripped out from under them, are going to release their very own version of a double-live gonzo album next week:

This was already announced a while ago, Twitter-diving shows, but it’s new to me dammit!

Good. Great. Grand. Wonderful. This is very much a Weekender item. So why am I blogging a whole-ass post out for it? Because, starters, it’s been a minute since the last time we had good reason to post a BABYMETAL thing, and also because I have now listened to the previews and deemed them good, and because today is a very special day, my very own Fox Day if you will, as it is the sixth anniversary of my first BABYMETAL experience (it was “Megitsune”), which is almost as life-defining as the time I decided to strike up a conversation with the person to whom I am now engaged to be married and also very easy to remember because it’s my brother’s birthday. So in honor of the unofficial beginning of Maniac and the eventual establishment of ye olde website, I blog a BABYMETAL post. Continue reading

A Very Special Edition of the Mond– Tuesday Match Game

Hey, do you guys remember IRONBUNNY? I sure do, and even though I ultimately wasn’t moved to make them a proper Homicidols Big Deal, things changed when they popped up in the Western metal press:

I’ve had them on speed dial for the past week because I noticed on Twitter that they’d recorded an MV, which I took to be an almost dead certainty that we’d be getting that MV in due time, and sure enough it happened! It’s a good song, and what incredible timing, considering that I hadn’t had a chance to write up the latest BABYMETAL MV yet but still intended to do so — but would life really be best served with two separate posts about idol metal that has happened to connect to one degree or another in the West, or would things be much more fun than to smash those two things together into a single empty competition? You know the answer by now! Continue reading