Chirimen

I Thought You All Might Like a Chirimen Update

/ Homicidol Maniac

I love the mood that Best Of season puts me in — everything has just a little bit more shine to it because it’s all a contender months and months from now, when if it really holds up it’ll be seriously special, and if it doesn’t, well, it’s probably because either it never really deserved it, or it’s still special to me and damn you all for not liking it as much as me.

So here we are then a little while post the re-emergence of ex-969er Chirimen and the revelation that her solo career is imminent, with flair. In fact, there are a couple of examples and I was just sleeping on the first one because, you see, things are kind of busy around the Homicidols Dot Com offices these days. But! She dropped this one this morning, and with it I found more:

And this one is actually from last week, oops:

I like the first one more

Her first “self-destruction” is still a few weeks off, but Chirimen’s shaping things nicely to formally launch her solo career with nice momentum and a solid body of work. Really well and truly good for her — and maybe we’ll be adding her debut as a 2020 Best Of next year!

When That Solo Life Is Looking Promising

/ Homicidol Maniac

Once upon a time, I made an editorial decision that this site wouldn’t cover solo idols. The reasoning behind it, while not necessarily sound, did actually have a sensible motivation: I actually used to think that I needed to put definite rails around what was and wasn’t idol in addition to the poorly defined musical boundaries, and I considered solo artists as being too much in a grey area. But then Hanako-san and PSYBOU KANOJO broke that down, and past my own pretenses I could see plenty of unsung solo artists (mikicco, Ophelia 20mg, fucking Lein) doing cool and interesting work and idoling at the same time.

That’s a very long way of saying that I still sometimes get surprised by how much I like certain solo idols even though all logic says that I shouldn’t. And with plenty of solo idols coming out of fairly well-known groups as their relative point of origin, it only stands to reason that good would beget good, etc.

Which is a slightly less long way of saying that Chirimen, formerly of long-term Homicidols Dot Com not-secret crush 969, has in fact made good on that solid background and her own talents to strike out as a solo performer, and this is her first piece and I’m very excited about this: Continue reading →