It’s Time to Get into Toricago, Gang

Update: And there’s an MV!


And more to the point, if you’re yet to get onto the Toricago bandwagon despite the pretty breathless reception that I’ve given them since their debut (in March, no less!), now might be a good time, because they might be ready to break out, and soon.

Their first album, i cAn FLY, sprang into existence on Tuesday, and it’s ready for you to download and whatnot:

Lots of idols release stuff all the time, you correctly point out, but you, Maniac, rarely make that much of a deal about it. What’s so special about this? I’ll tell you! It’s because we, as a community, are still mostly neck-deep in the acts that got us into idol in the first place (or their descendants/sisters), which largely scans to a 2014-16 time frame (thanks Babymetal!), and while we individually catch up with acts the correspond to our own biases over time, the tippy-top community favorites are largely unchanged over the last couple of years. Toricago, along with a handful of others who have debuted over the past year, has a chance to break some of that hegemony and potentially even be a standard-bearer for idols dispensing with the last generation’s New Way of Doing Things and forging on with scene-defining work of their own. Continue reading