Under Beasty

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 →

UNDER BEASTY Got Themselves a TV Show Theme

/ Homicidol Maniac

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

UNDER BEASTY Is Releasing Too Much Music and It Makes My Brain Hurt, Thank Goodness

/ Homicidol Maniac

I bet you, yes you!, have read through the Weekender while sipping your free trade organic Sumatran dark roast coffee and pondered, gee, how does this sausage get made? Well, friend, I’m here to tell you that the Weekender is painstakingly curated over the course of t– HA HA HA! I mean, yeah, it takes some work, but for the most part somebody makes a draft post for it and sticks in something, and then others on Team add around it, and then I get lazy and make an Idol in Focus, and back when we had the various other features we’d look for X, Y or Z, but then the coup de grace on Saturday morning is my personal dive through the very many hundreds of YouTube accounts that I subscribe to, hunting for new content that is both genuinely new, genuinely interesting and from diverse enough sources that you don’t always see the same things. And now that we’ve set the stage, let me say that those video dives often yield more workable content than you’d expect, and in this past weekend’s case very notable drew my eyes back toward the former indie wonders in UNDER BEASTY, and a new MV from them, and that is right below, but also let me say that no post can make any sense (even with the way I write!) without additional context, and so it was that I also looked to UB Twitter and saw that they’re releasing a new single, and so this all made sense:

However! Just a few days prior, they dropped the MV for “Trust in …”, which is an almost perfect idorock ballad:

Now, “Trust in …” is actually a completely different single release, from the first week of August, which means that it is in no way associated with “Real Blade”, which … releases next week: Continue reading →

This Is Your Periodic Reminder That UNDERBEASTY Rocks

/ Homicidol Maniac

Another one that’s a couple of days old, but worth it, comes to us from UNDER BEASTY and the near-semiannual post about them and their unique spin on idol rock, and their apparent agelessness now to boot because they’re officially passing into Legacy Idol territory at this point and my girl Yua is showing absolutely no signs of slowing down. This one is not from a recent release or even their last release, but apparently one that they wanted to do a lyric video for!

Maybe it’s their roots in being one of the truest indie idol projects to ever that keeps UB so thoroughly rooted in idol as an operating principle — they embraced a previously unconventional musical style, but their whole presentation, right down to the sporadic release schedule, is eminently idol-typical, and while it clearly works for them, it makes me sad to think about how it’s ultimately a constraint (especially because they maintain that they’re VK-oriented). Like, this song is a rocker, up there with their best if you ask me, and I wish that UB had an avenue to get just a little bit bigger. But hey, what they do, they do really damn well, and they don’t seem to be in any kind of hurry to change, so what do I know? Other than that this is a much more interesting way to do a lyric video than the vast major of lyric videos, I mean.

Rock Your Socks off with Under Beasty

/ Homicidol Maniac

Wednesdays sucks and existence is pain. Ergo, you should take my word for it that the arrival of the MV for Under Beasty’s new (and first major) single is what you need to emerge from a funk borne of seasonal blahs and bad news. It’s like an injection of better:

There are times when I’m in a mood for true idorock, friends, and this is one of those times. It’s true, as the sages say, that every idorock song emanates from the One True Idorock (origin uncertain, possibly recorded by Kamen Rider Girls at the beginning of Idol Time) and, in the space between realms that transcends time, converges again with every other idorock song to create the One True Idorock. That familiarity, that safety, that goofy feeling of elaborately costumed young women song-and-dancing through a sonic blitz and making it sound pretty … love.

Let’s Catch up with a Whole Bunch of UNDER BEASTY

/ Homicidol Maniac

Please allow me to apologize to one of my low-key favorite things in idol, going all the way back to when random YouTube dives were all you really had to compare to the handful of English-language resources for chika idol: UNDER BEASTY, I done you wrong, and I’m here today to make it right. We need to catch up!

Gah, where to begin. Well, probably with the fact that they’re about to release their … fifth? Fifth single:

Continue reading →

Under Beasty Made It to Their Fourth Anniversary

/ Homicidol Maniac / 3 Comments

This started off as a Weekender joint, but I had one of those moments where you realize that you’ve been forgetting about idols that you really like simply because there’s too much dang idol and other stuff, and they’ve been a little off to the side of the radar, and whose fault is that but your own? Exactly.

Under Beasty, The Super-Indie Idols Who Could, one of those groups that I’ve pretty much always and pretty much always will champion if for no greater reason than their ability to prove that even the totally self-produced can make this wild game work, have had a pretty good ride of things over the years. They’re not even super-indie anymore, having hooked up with actual management along the way and gotten a strong enough budget to release stuff like this and put on decently sized one-mans.

So consider this a celebration of them, in a way, because this right here is what I wanted to Weekender:

But there’s more going on, and they deserve a fuller post. Continue reading →

‘love pain’ Is Under Beasty’s New Level

/ Homicidol Maniac

The fine post-indie rock idols in Under Beasty did us all a solid with the teaser for their umpteenth single, “love pain,” and I’ll admit — because they sounded like their third or fourth shift in sound over the last couple of years, I was extremely apprehensive about the result. Like, would it even be good? It’s too easy to either hit a sweet spot as a unit or fall back on lazy tropes to get a release out the door, you know?

I should have just trusted in Yua.

Continue reading →

It’s Our First Somewhat Detailed Look at Under Beasty’s New Single

/ Homicidol Maniac

Ah, Under Beasty, as good and pure and true as any rock idol act in the game, all bootstraps and try-hard until they got picked up by a real-deal agency, and … well, I guess things are roughly the same still, except now their outfits are a little sharper.

Anyway! They had teased their upcoming single a little while back, with the live debut and everything, but now there’s a teaser version of the MV to sink your teeth into:

… and it’s apparently swinging as all hell! Continue reading →

This Is an Under Beasty Update

/ Homicidol Maniac

Who doesn’t like Under Beasty? Well, among those of you who know who they are, at least. Everybody likes UB! What’s not to like about a literally self-made unit that got picked up by a mid-major agency and just keeps on plugging away, and tends to have some pretty nice music to boot?

That’s what I thought.

So! They very conveniently shared a chunk of their live yesterday via Periscope right around the time that I went sniffing after them because, hey, it’s been a minute since the last Under Beasty post.

periscope live!

Continue reading →