Put Up Your Dukes and Fight with buGG

It finally arrived! I first listened to buGG’s new “MY FIGHT SONG” single what feels like a couple of weeks ago, on the Spotify, and figured that there’d be an MV at some point. And now there is!

Watching buGG grow from the fun sidecar PIIIIIIIN little sisters into, well, very much their own thing has been cool. They still have that signature impossible energy and outright bounce to their sound. I just can’t believe it’s only their second single ever! I mean, the discography available online isn’t exactly sparse, just that, like, you usually expect way more singles than other releases, this being idol and all. They’ve only been at this for like three years! But anyway:

Fun fact: Everything about this is hundreds of percents cooler than every American pop punk thing ever done

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Well That Was Easy

It feels like basically yesterday that we were lamenting the departure of our dear Yuna from PassCode. I think everyone who follows them was immediately curious to see who would replace her in the group, right down to some obligatory dream casting. And yet somehow I allowed myself a moment of pleasant surprise when this tweet popped up a little while ago:

Yep, that’s ex-LADYBABY Emily, that is undeniably a very good harsh singer but one of the more oddly utilized ones in her old group. The timing of it all suggests that she was already in the wings before Yuna’s retirement announcement, sure, but frankly you probably could have had her on retainer ever since LADYBABY went under and barely missed a beat — the two singers’ styles aren’t quite the same, but honestly? Natural fit, right timing, easy thing for fans to accept. Emily officially joins in a few weeks at the kickoff of a quick Zepp tour prior to the close of the STRIVE tour pre-Budokan, so good opportunities for those who actually can to properly greet the new girl.

Good job, PassCode, and welcome, Emily!

This Is a New Single from Haruno Yumu

When you’ve been at this idol game for a while, not only do you find yourself with a startling amount of otherwise useless knowledge, the amount of recall you’ve built up as a bank gets to be almost harrowing to consider. I had the privilege of talking about ye olde website and its advent a couple of weeks back with a friend who I hadn’t seen in years, for instance, and after getting through the tl;dr Homicidols Elevator Pitch, he sort of good-naturedly challenged me on just how much there would really be to talk about. I made him look through our archives on his phone while I narrated the process of discovering literally hundreds of loud-aligned idol groups over time, and following his surprise waxed nostalgic on certain acts from way back in the day, names like petit pas! and THE SPUNKY and Tsubasa Fly, names you might not recognize if you’ve only been around in the past couple of years. And then I enjoyed telling him about the long-timers that are still out there! Your You’ll Melt More! and NECRONOMIDOL and … UNDER BEASTY. And that’s when I kind of lit up, for not only do I love them all, but UB holds a very special place in my heart for having navigated their way from a truly indie origin all the way to a major label. Anybody who’s ever turned to their idiot friends and said “we should start a band!” (as I had several times with the friend mentioned here) can relate to the excitement that wells up inside in those moments — and UB lived it.

So yeah, while I did just get to post about UNDER BEASTY recently and reflect a bit on that trajectory therein, here’s another chance because Yumu just dropped her second single: Continue reading

I Need to Post Something and SHINGEKI Is Definitely Something

We’ll, we’re two weeks late to this party and you really do run out of things to say about SHINGEKI after a while, so this is going to be one of the least interesting posts in the long, agonizing history of Homicidols Dot Com. But hey, new MV, completely bonkers, you know the drill:

I actually unironically love it! Also unironically love this tweet for just plain putting it out there:

Remember, this group is going to Budokan.

In a Very Important Friday Tradition, We Have New STARMARIE

When was the last time we got to do a STARMARIE post? I know things have been weird out there, but Friday and STARMARIE used to go together like spaghetti and meat sauce (which is to say, deliciously). Yeah, more often than not it was just live clips, but what’s wrong with that? Truth be told, ol’ STARMARIE hasn’t done a whole lot of new material in recent times, and IIRC it’s been almost a year since their last release, and nowadays Homicidols Dot Com really relies on those new releases to have things to talk about.

BUT THIS IS A STARMARIE POST, and if there’s one thing that STARMARIE has always been good at providing, it’s cool idorock befitting their gimmick as like guardians of esoteric knowledge or what have you, but actually more precisely it’s cool idorock that works well as theme songs for other media. And here we are again! I was very pleased to find that STARMARIE had a whole new MV for a whole new song, like just generally, and deeply unsurprised to see that it’s a theme for a movie: Continue reading

I Enjoy This Particular BiSH Song Template

So as I was saying before, I had pretty high hopes for this BiSH album (out now!), and they graced us this morning with another MV from it, which:

I am supposed to be working right now, so this is also very short, so let’s suffice it to say that while the opening worried me that we had another “Orchestra” clone, “BE READY” here is more reminiscent of stuff from the FAKE METAL JACKET era, which for my money was actually the superior point in BiSH anthems, though now it’s both grown up and does include some tropes familiar to anybody who likes WACK artists or even just SCRAMBLES products.

I get to listen to the album today and remain pretty stoked about it.

UNDER BEASTY Got Themselves a TV Show Theme

Where my other old-time UNDER BEASTY fans at? This is so cool, right? Our girls landed themselves a TV show theme, and while it is pretty standard idorock, it’s good standard idorock, and with a cool MV to boot:

UB’s soon to celebrate their seventh anniversary (as UNDER BEASTY). I’m always so happy for them.

This is a very short post because I’m on a train

It’s Good to See PapiRosier After All This Time

Some idol groups, even those that are just grinding away on chika stage after chika stage, release tons of material and as a result are super accessible; others … not so much. I do have a gift for recall, fortunately, so it’s rare to really, truly forget about a unit once introduced, but as time goes on and life’s priorities change, I do have to admit to being surprised when certain projects pop up from the blind spots in my mind.

Like PapiRosier, who released this MV the other day for their new single! This is the first thing I wrote about them, in the summer of 2016; we have averaged 0.8 post per year from them since, as that seems to be the approximate release schedule. And given how things change over time and the whole “heavy idol” thing has run its course in certain ways, I fully expected this MV to be a simple, sparkling idol song, probably kind of anthemic because that’s what they do, but bereft of much in the way of rock sounds and definitely not something to blog a post about: Continue reading

The New SIPP Single Is Awesome

This website is very pro-SIPP, to the point where I’m very comfortable saying right now that they’re the best debut of 2021 so far and will be very hard to dethrone. “3 or Two” is their latest single, out this past week, and frankly if this one doesn’t convince you that they’re as legit as it gets and gods be good future mainstays we’ll be talking about for years, I don’t know if we can be friends:

Just, what a group. Talent across the roster, excellent diversity of voices, very little in the way of gimmicks, somehow elevating both the “pop” and “punk” parts of their theme beyond what anybody else is doing with either, absolutely masterful hook … there are other groups doing good pop punk, and some do it very well at that, but is anybody doing it better than SIPP? Friend, I think not.

March of the PIGGS

I’ve just always wanted to title a post this, thanks Lui

The new PIGGS single hits stores in a few days, and mid-last week they released the second MV from it (first), and it’s still not the title track, so that leaves a great deal of hope in there being yet another video coming our way. But for the whole reason that I got a NIN vibe before even listening to the thing, here’s “Piggy”:

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