Picture the scene: you’ve fallen asleep watching TV and when you wake up, it’s 6am and the sun is about to rise. You have drool on your face and pillow and notice the remote next to you, so you start flicking through the channels. Everything looks like TV, but is it really TV? Are you asleep or are you still dreaming? You can’t tell, so you go back to bed. That’s the new NELN music video in a nutshell.
NELN
Here’s NELN’s Entry for Song of the Summer
I’ve been on the lookout for good summertime best-of candidates around the idolverse the past few weeks — our pal N.FENI sort of stole a lot of that thunder though — and frankly coming up kind of short. Am I crazy? I feel like it was normal in the past for even the alt/chika scene to get a few good candidates (even if they were piss-takes) into the mix, and this year just not so much. Pandemic? Olympics? Everybody forgot how calendars work?
Anyway, not a whole lot has happened this week, but our well-loved pals in NELN did drop an album the other day (stuff we know, though), and along with it a new single that … no, screw it, I already ruined the pun.
NELN Did It
Twelve months since their debut in the teeth of “in these uncertain times,” NELN has very literally gone full circle and made it to the end of the journey they promised — the final monthly MV has been delivered. There’s been an incredible mix of mostly high quality all along the way, and to say that I’ve been anticipating this with real feeling is a little bit of an understatement — each month’s MV has come at slightly different times “toward the” end of the month, so I’ve been following the dang Twitter account like a bloodhound since Sunday. Today, payoff.
That’s just absolutely lovely. The thing’s an homage to the whole sequence of MVs that got us here over … wow, NELN, I doubt that “do a year-long debut sequence while society closes due to worldwide pandemic conditions” was the actual design, but it paid off perfectly. And here in this MV we get that story played out again, referring to the past works and I’m sure riddled with other Easter eggs that people far more in the know can inform on. Different strokes for different folks and all, but I’d be pleased if this one came up in the Best Of discussion. The song is of course quite nice on its own, though a little done at this point in the sequence, but it serves its role as tentpole very well.
What’s next for NELN? We’ll find out soon!
NELN’s Latest Move Is the Emotional Gut-punch
“Oh heck, it’s just about the end of the month, we must have a new NELN MV coming any minute now!” said I to myself on Thursday when I was trying to do a lot of productive work and instead kept needing to stick my head into Twitter and managed to scroll through long enough to see a NELN tweet. And of course I was excited — have you seen what NELN does? — and really hoped that they’d drop that this morning so I could fold this post into the Homicidols Time that comes on weekend mornings. And it did! So let’s talk about it.
I will reiterate later, but it bears pre-reiterating now: NELN, if you are unfamiliar, is releasing 12 MVs over 12 months since they debuted last year, and this is #11, and there has been some really great work from this kind-of-out-of-nowhere group during the process, so of course the expectation here is high. And so: Continue reading
Jesus Christ, This Is Absolutely Perfect
NELN, as expected, dropped yet another single in their 12-month-long series of releases, and did so right at the end of the month per usual. I want to get all of the reax out of the way first because, I swear to you, if you haven’t already watched this video and/or listened to this song, you’re going to be more than a little impressed, and you’re going to be like, oh wow, didn’t they do nine of these during 2020? And why didn’t we make them the debut of the year? And the answer is that I don’t know, but seriously it’s like NELN is just upping the ante every month, and I’m almost afraid of the beauty they’ll spring on us when the series ends in March and then they’ll do something during their big gig in April that might break reality. We’ll see. In the meantime: “snow light”:
Everything about that is wonderful.
NELN Releases ‘REM’ MV
2020 has been a challenge, and people have had to cope the best way they can. Some have been fairly constructive; for others, though, they’re at the point where they’re losing their religion. Everybody hurts sometimes, after all. If you’re here, no matter how you’ve faced down 2020, idol is a respite, and pretty much nobody idoled harder this year than NELN, who this morning dropped their ninth in a series of 12 monthly MVs to commemorate their debut.
Twelve in a row! But why not? If you believe they put a man on the moon, you can believe in NELN having a lot more up their sleeve. Which they clearly do — their work so far has moved around between different flavors of creative rock and pop, and the frequency this time is a nice, subdued feel-good vibe:
Well that’s just nice. Anything that ends with shiny happy people and a very relieved yarn monster is okay with me. But it’s a powerful message nonetheless, because I think we can all relate to losing the one we love. It’s not the end of the world as we know it, though; as long as we have friends or busybody local girls or what have you, you don’t need to stand for anything because your problesm will be solved for you. Actually, I have no idea what the message is.
Three more to go. NELN good.
The Energy in NELN’s Latest Is Exactly What We Need
I learned an important thing about NELN this morning: The reason they’ve been so prolific since their debut back in the spring has been because they debuted with the intention of releasing a new MV every month for their first 12 months of existence. That really puts it all in context! And explains that here we are, on the final day of November, and yet another NELN MV has arrived. It may not be the rip-roaringest thing they’ve ever done, but it is a lovely little bit of idorock with a clever MV and you know what? You should just be doing this yourself:
Let’s Discover Some Idols: NELN
In the interests of keeping things light and good while at the same time rushing to get out a few more of these Let’s Discover Somes before we get the ball rolling on Best Of voting in a few weeks, I thought it was good to return to not just easily one of the best debuts this year, but definitely the most prolific and absolutely the one who I’d already done the most drafting (and therefore least work now) for!
Yes, friends, at some point in the past several months, if you’ve been active in just about any idol lists, you’ve no doubt run into who is probably the most enthusiastically multimedia of all non-major idols in quite some time, almost certainly via one of their umpteen videos:
Yeah, that’s NELN (Twitter), and they’re awesome. Continue reading
