You Can Actually Stream and Purchase BiS3 Now

/ Cal

Who wants to waste time reading an introductory paragraph? Go stream the new BiS! The last release we got out here was “I can’t say NO!!!!!” in 2017!

So what gives? Why did it take so long? Well we don’t actually know, but nobody running a business is going to turn down money if it can be helped. Watanabe (who contrary to popular belief, does not have a button that clears songs for overseas release in his office that he was just refusing to press) talks all the time about wanting to bring WACK overseas so it’s not like any of this was happening out of any kind of spite or poor decision making.

Brand-new idol Society 2019 and LOOKiE still aren’t up, but the promo tracks from their upcoming “ANTi CONFORMiST SUPERSTAR” are free to stream. Or purchase them if you feel like stimulating Japan’s economy.

The run-up to this release has definitely been a fun one – in lieu of a traditional scavenger hunt because nobody could reasonably go outside, DESTROY and CURTAiN CALL were released into the wild on online auction sites. Fans had to find them themselves and once the masses of Twitter found out, they sold lightning fast. Imitation Sensation also received a guerrilla release the other day, but since people in Japan are slowly being forced to return to normalcy, they just dumped a bunch of cassette tapes in Tower Records and let fans find them in their own time.
The cassette tape covers were parodies of enka singer album covers, so if you know anything about that you’ll probably get a chuckle out of it. We do love a good laugh. A wee giggle even.

BiS are a group with the most infamous legacies in the idol world – turning a decade old later this year. There are overseas fans who have been supporting them in any incarnation since the very beginning but have had their accessibility taken away ever since their major label debut. It’s not hard to head on over to CDJapan if something isn’t up for streaming, but the hurdles of “import tax” and “shipping fees” are a large discouragement from financial interaction. The point is to help the idols themselves make money, not the government’s shipping and handling office.
BiS fans in particular have suffered a lot – from shitty thinkpieces on major news publications to shitty thinkpieces on blogs (like this one) to shitty translations, they have dealt with more shit than BiS themselves in the STUPiD video. For fans in Japan this release is just business as usual with a fun scavenger hunt preceding it, but for international fans? A restart. If you can’t go to shows and meet them regularly then the digital world is important – you want to be able to listen to singers actually sing. It’s 2020, foreign fans of Japanese music don’t have to illegally download things from Visual Kei themed Blogspots anymore, we have the same conveniences as everyone else now.

If you liked the preview tracks from ANTi CONFORMiST SUPERSTAR you’ll be pleased to know that the full EP drops on August 19th. There’s a special edition that comes with a Blu-ray of the STAND BY BiS tour final and a photobook too if you feel like tackling the aforementioned import tax demons.

So let’s get an unironic “thanks Watanabe” and of course, “thanks Revolver Records”. They’re the ones who have the giant button in their office after all.