single

Put Up Your Dukes and Fight with buGG

/ Homicidol Maniac

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

Continue reading →

This Is a New Single from Haruno Yumu

/ Homicidol Maniac

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 →

It’s Good to See PapiRosier After All This Time

/ Homicidol Maniac

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

/ Homicidol Maniac

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

/ Homicidol Maniac

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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Here’s NELN’s Entry for Song of the Summer

/ Homicidol Maniac

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.

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Let’s Celebrate AKIARIM’s Anniversary with Them

/ Homicidol Maniac

Imagine having to debut as an idol during pandemic lockdowns. Idoling, as an industry, was unsurprisingly able to adapt to full-time virtual performances and lots of livestreams and the like, but those things are all much easier when you’re an act that people know about. Something with fans, like. Much less true for something that has been building toward a first public appearance but hasn’t so much as stepped onto a stage with an audience yet! Obviously a lot of units went on hiatus basically before they even officially launched; others went ahead and did what they could and made the most of it, and frankly those feel like the ones that made the smart decision.

This does bring us to AKIARIM, yes, who had a debut pretty much just as things were starting to go completely haywire but stuck it out and made it work after hitting the pause button and re-debuting in the summer after things had settled down a bit. Hence the anniversary tour and various other festivities all happening now! Among them: Continue reading →

I Think We’re Going to Like the New PIGGS Single

/ Homicidol Maniac

Somehow or another, the permanent breakup between BiS and Pour Lui has turned out to be the best thing that could happen to both things — the OG punk idols’ resurrection seemed as likely to be a branding exercise as anything else when they were re-constituted without the founder or any past members at all, yet have been remarkably stable and arguably as good as ever; the OG punk idol herself, the grand dame of this scene, went off and formed a unit that has her fingerprints all over it and, sans some of the pretenses of Lui’s past work, just keeps knocking ’em out of the park.

So yeah, here we are, a second single in as many fiscal year quarters on the horizon, and PIGGS is doing it so good and making it look so easy:

Our girl Saki on the choreo too, if it wasn’t obvious Continue reading →

Let’s Discover Some Idols: DEARDEVIL

/ Homicidol Maniac

I get the feeling that this one is less a Let’s Discover and more a Let’s Mutually Agree To Play Along While Maniac Covers His Ass About New Idols, so bear with me. But if you’ve been anywhere near the wonderful devilsend that is Satanic Punish, you’ve no doubt come across a worthy sister project called DEARDEVIL, which is just such a delicious bit of wordplay that I’m mad I didn’t think of it first. But anyway!

This is DEARDEVIL (Twitter), and this is my first exposure to them: Continue reading →

EIMIE Has the Best Release Strategy

/ Homicidol Maniac

The nice thing about regular check-ins on your YouTube subscriptions? You get to see when the acts you follow schedule debuts without having to delve into the cesspool that is Twitter.

So it unfolded in the composition of the Weekender, as there were several scheduled live streams and debuts of various things in the queue, and if anything I’m just mad that I had to wait for this new one from EIMIE for more than a day because you know I don’t work on Sundays anymore. But here:

The occasion? I have no idea! They bill it as “new song,” and it certainly is that. This is my kind of untethered audacity — eschew all norms for new releases and just get the things out there into the world in as shiny a package as you can. And is anybody complaining? Short of a handful of people who are big EIMIE stans desperately hoping for a physical album they can buy like 30 copies of, no! It’s a fun song that’s a little less on the outright heavy than the last one and a little more on the outright idol, with a snazzy-ass MV. I realize that not every unit in existence can put that much resource into every new song they deliver, but that doesn’t mean that the EIMIE standard shouldn’t be the overall one. Like okay sure, maybe you hamstring your ability to “sell records” and whatnot, but just think of how much more media we’d get more often!