Sugarpills

These Sugarpills Ain’t No Placebo

/ Homicidol Maniac

Does that pun work? Like do most of you even get it? Feh!

I’m mad at every information service in existence for not just up and telling me that Sugarpills had made good on their promised single. Missed it on Twitter, Spotify sent me nothing, it turned out that I hadn’t subscribed to them on YouTube after all like an idiot, so I literally found out about this by accident fully a month after the fact. Just terrible. But yes, one of my very favorite debuts of 2020 staffed up in the intervening months (which you’d know if you read the Weekender!) and released this single all the way back at the beginning of April:

It’ll cure what ails you! Now does the pun make sense?

Nice standard punk sounds, nice idol vocals to go with, a combination made in heaven. A true reviewer of music and media would knock the mix, probably, and ask for a higher quality to the MV, but honestly — this is an indie-as-hell project, and half of the charm in both idol and punk is in the rough edges. I’m personally just stoked that this fun, better-than-you-assume project is thriving and looking to the future.

Let’s Discover Some Idols: Sugarpills

/ Homicidol Maniac

Well gang, I’m not sure if we’ll ever get to discover all of the idols worth discovering this year before the gate closes in a couple of weeks, so let’s expedite all of my personal favorites only the very best toward the front of the line.

A few weeks ago, while doing that thing where you look at the bills from random taibans for idols you haven’t heard of yet, and drawn like a moth to flame by the magic word “idolcore,” I went on a little riff through as-yet-unknown-to-me Osaka-area idols and found myself staring one act right in the face. Their name sounded kind of cutesy, but the limited photography of them didn’t line up with that. I figured, hey, part of why I’m doing this is to have something new to listen to for a little while, let’s see what it’s like. And oh my friends, what a good decision that turned out to be:

That’s Sugarpills, and on the strength of two whole songs they might be my favorite debut this year. Continue reading →