Homicidols

Your Homicidols Weekender #467 Banner Image: Not Secured, Loose Ends. This weekend, we are coming to you live from day two of U.S. Idol Fes in Los Angeles. Yesterday, YURAPICO kicked off the day one main stage with the first of her weekend performances. She will closing out tonight's main stage, followed by a meet and greet where you can pick up your very own YURAPICO x HOMICIDOLS collaboration T-Shirt!!

Your Homicidols Weekender #467

Banner Image: Not Secured, Loose Ends. This weekend, we are coming to you live from day two of U.S. Idol Fes in Los Angeles. Yesterday, YURAPICO kicked off the day one main stage with the first of her weekend performances. She will closing out tonight's main stage,…

Homicidols is officially 10 years old. Happy Birthday to us!! 🎂 🎉
#10KilllerYearsofHomicidols

Your Homicidols Weekender #466 Banner Image: MAZARI. It was a strangely quiet week. While some of our favorite art, shoegaze, and dream pop idols dropped new releases, most of the louder and darker units seemed to take it easy, perhaps in preparation for next weekend and Halloween, one of the biggest holidays in the idol calendar.

Your Homicidols Weekender #466

10 Years of Homicidols By the Numbers: Top Artists Let's try this one again: You may have seen a half-baked version of this article post on Tuesday. I wish that I could say it was all an illusion but, no, it was just another one of my screw ups. I could have sworn that I had calendared it to publish on Thursday but, instead, it went up on Tuesday well before it was ready and I had to scrub it from existence. It is one of the enduring mysteries of this site: while there are any number of qualities that contribute to our status of being the longest running English language chika idol blog on the planet, competence is certainly not among them.

10 years. 4,946 posts. Countless questionable editorial decisions.
We’ve tallied the most-written-about and most-clicked idols of the past decade.

Your Homicidols Weekender #465 Banner Image: NARUKAMI. It’s been a perfectly normal week in the chika idol scene meaning a big unit called it quits, a storied idol announced her intention to vanish into the void, and fantastic new songs and MVs dropped to keep making it all worthwhile. All of that is below, but first:

Your Homicidols Weekender #465

Homicidols will be at US Idol Fes. Come join our panel on Sunday morning at 10:30 am. Let's chat about loud idols and music and stuff.

Your Homicidols Weekender #464 Banner image: DorothyDrop. Two weeks into October, it's firmly turned into that time of year when everyone else starts flirting with the idea of “dark aesthetics,” while the chika idol scene just shrugs and says, “Welcome to our whole wide world.” With Halloween creeping closer, there’s no shortage of chilling tracks, moody MVs, and ominous member announcements to keep us entertained and/or traumatized. After a while in the chika idol fandom it's hard to tell the difference.

With 20 more days until Halloween we're already steeped in darkness in The Weekender

10 Years of Homicidols: By the Numbers Well, look at us. Almost ten years old. Only a handful of idol groups make it that long and, honestly, we’re just as surprised as you are. What started as a questionable idea (“let’s write about underground idols from half-way around the world who perform in and speak a language that we don’t even understand; how hard can it be?”) somehow mutated into a decade-long obsession that’s eaten up countless weekends, introduced us to innumerable friends from around the world, and exposed us to a legion of idols and oshis and losses that we’ll never emotionally recover from.

10 Years of Homicidols: By the Numbers

Well, look at us. Almost ten years old. Only a handful of idol groups make it that long and, honestly, we’re just as surprised as you are. What started as a questionable idea (“let’s write about underground idols from half-way around the world who perform in…

Your Homicidols Weekender #463 Banner Image: MØZU. It's October! This is one of our favorite months of the year because it contains one of our favorite holidays: Idol Halloween. Idols are already getting into the Halloween spirit!

Happy October! There's only 27 days left until Idol Halloween. Get prepared in The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #462 Banner image: THE ORCHESTRA TOKYO. Just a quick reminder that one month from today is US Idol Fest. YURAPICO will appearing alongside kaigai idols from all over the world. Homicidols will be there too. We're presenting a panel and have some other surprises to be announced as well. If you are thinking of attending, I recommend picking up a badge very soon.

Your Homicidols Weekender #462

Banner image: THE ORCHESTRA TOKYO. Just a quick reminder that one month from today is US Idol Fest. YURAPICO will appearing alongside kaigai idols from all over the world. Homicidols will be there too. We're presenting a panel and have some other surprises to be…

Best of Homicidols: The Boys of Alternative Idol Revisited Next up in our Best of Homicidols countdown to our 10th anniversary, we would like to revisit one of the most popular articles we've ever published. Back in 2022, Cal and I teamed up for a feature exploring the dearth of male idols in the alternative and underground idol space while, at the same time, boy groups dominate large sectors of the mainstream J-Pop charts. We also wanted to recognize those groundbreaking male idols who were making significant contributions to our favorite genre.

Best of Homicidols: The Boys of Alternative Idol Revisited

Next up in our Best of Homicidols countdown to our 10th anniversary, we would like to revisit one of the most popular articles we've ever published. Back in 2022, Cal and I teamed up for a feature exploring the dearth of male idols in the…

Your Homicidols Weekender #461 Banner image: EMPATHY. It was a good week in chika idol! For the record, the barometer for "good" is any week where the Oshiloss Corner ends up shorter than Oshifound. Here's the deets: ASP are back in the UK and warming up for their three-date tour with a couple of free events in London this weekend. Today, you can catch them for cheki at Worlds End pub in Camden. Tomorrow they will will holding a free live and cheki in Trafalgar square.

Idols in the UK, one of the best albums of the year just dropped, plus more in The Weekender.

For our 10th anniversary we present the Best of Homicidols: The Idol Suicides

Your Homicidols Weekender #460 Banner image: cowolo. I almost hit "Publish" without drafting this preamble which would have been a tragedy because I know how this opening paragraph is what everyone looks forward to the most on every Weekender. For those of you not immediately scrolling down to the idol content, I want to remind you that US Idol Fes is coming up this Halloween weekend in LA. YURAPICO (and many other idols) will be there and Homicidols will too, so we would love to see you there.

Reminder: the world is full of good things. Proof: all this stuff in The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #459 Banner image: SITUASION. This week was quite eventful. We had new releases dropping from A-listers almost every day plus a couple of surprise member ADDITIONS which is unusual in a genre that specializes in unexpected member subtractions. We welcome this the new trend! Since there is a lot to get through, let's just jump right in:

Lots of A-List releases and other pleasant surprises. It’s almost all good news in this edition of The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #458 Banner image: Teenage New Punk Story. It's a bit of a bittersweet weekend. It is a three-day holiday weekend in the US and, for the last several years, I have spent this time off at Saboten Con having fun with the likes of Candye Syrup, Broken By The Scream, MELON BATAKE A GO GO, Tokyo Psychopath and YURAPICO. This year, unfortunately, Saboten Con has decided not to include idols in their programming, so I am home with little to do, no real reason to attend Saboten Con, and definitely no idol performances or off kais on my schedule.

There's no idols in town and the Oshiloss Corner is a bloodbath, but there's still a lot of good stuff in The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #457 Banner image: hakanai. Happy weekend dear reader! Thanks for dropping by and reading ye olde idol blog (turning 10 years old in October!!). Being here means one thing: you’re already knee-deep in the world of alt, indie, and underground idols. You know the emotional whiplash of debuts and disbandments . You probably still buy CDs, can't pass up an opportunity to acquire more cheki, and own way too many idol t-shirts and tiny towels. You're probably one of the last people you know who is still on Twitter because that's where the idols are.

Ever want to be an idol? Even if the answer is, "No," please visit The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #456 Banner image: SITUASION. Here is your weekly digest of some of the happenings in the world of chika idol. I can never fit in everything, so I highly recommend folks join the Homicidols Discord server to catch everything that slips through the Weekender's cracks. It's very friendly over there, and sometimes there's cake (disclaimer: there's never cake).

Good news in the Oshiloss Corner? It’s apparently possible. See how in The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #455 Banner image: AIBECK. It was a fantastic week for loud idol. Not only did the genre's foundational powerhouse, BABYMETAL, drop the goods, but we got a huge announcement from Broken By the Scream and a flood of new releases from some of the best and loudest voices in the game. It was a great week to be an loudol fan!! (Unless you are a Miyu wota. Sorry.)

It was great week to be a fan of loud idols! Here's your Homicidols Weekender #455

Your Homicidols Weekender #454 Banner image: Candye♡Syrup. It's Tokyo Idol Festival weekend and I guess I will be nicer about it this year. I'm still a bit bitter because, for the past three years, the organizers of the largest idol festival in THE WORLD decided to not only lock TiF live streams behind a substantial paywall, but also blocked all viewers from outside of Japan. This year, a couple of the stages are back on Nico Nico and available to overseas folks for a price, but I'm stubborn, hold grudges, and have abandonment issues, so I'm still basically in…

Here's the "Fxxk TiF" edition of the Weekender for 2025.

Your Homicidols Weekender #453 Banner image: Odoro. Folks may be completely unaware, but Homicidols is quickly homing in on our 10 year anniversary which will hit in mid-October. I have been recently scouring the site archives and got nostalgic about those days back when our beloved founder, Maniac, used to sometimes post two or three updates a day. Meanwhile, between health issues and the demands of my Day Job®, I am currently only averaging slightly more than one post a week. Despite the low production numbers on the front page, I do want to assure readers that there are big and unique things in the works that we are very excited about, and that Homicidols is committed to being here for the long haul.

There’s good news and bad news, but it’s all idol news, which is good. Here’s the Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #452 Banner image: Made in Maiden. It has been a very eventful week in overseas idol news. Isiliel has been performing around London, including a stop at HYPER JAPAN. BABYMETAL announced a secret show taking place next week in LA to their half-a-million followers on Twitter. It sold out almost immediately, so I'm thinking someone may have tipped a few people off. We also got a trio of huge announcements of upcoming shows in Western Europe:

Some huge announcements of overseas idol lives and more, all captured in The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #451 Just a quick note to say that my spinal surgery went well and I am back home and under the care of multiple (prescribed) drugs with hefty street values. I want to finish this up quick so I can pop the pills that make me floaty but also make it very difficult to type. Recovery has been a bit tough. I want to send a special "Thank you" out to everyone for their well wishes and especially to the denizens of the Homicidols Discord server who made sure I didn't miss anything while I was under anesthesia.

It is recovery week, so let us reflect on the circle of life and idols in The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #450 Banner image: Jiemei. I am living vicariously this weekend though all of those around the world attending the many overseas idol lives taking place on almost every continent (everyone always overlooks Antarctica and poor penguin wota). Unfortunately, I am at home preparing for surgery on Tuesday. My spine is getting operated on which is good news as it will, hopefully, fix me up so I can get back to traveling around the world and seeing idols. Wish me luck! In the meantime, idols are all over the world this weekend:

Your Homicidols Weekender #450

Banner image: Jiemei. I am living vicariously this weekend though all of those around the world attending the many overseas idol lives taking place on almost every continent (everyone always overlooks Antarctica and poor penguin wota). Unfortunately, I am at home…

Your Homicidols Weekender #449 Banner image: Isiliel. Almost all of the big news this week revolves around Isiliel and her second album, Moonbow Rebellion. Himari recorded the album in Norway, the birthplace of black metal. It hit streaming services this last midnight.

Isiliel had the Best Week Ever and more in The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #448 Banner image: PassCode. I don't know how the timing works, but there are a few times each year when major releases seem to fall from the sky. We are currently living through one of those periods. Details are below, but first we have a few words on live idols in the West:

It is the season of scorching A-List releases. Details in the Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #447 Banner image: Kamisama no Iu Tori. I don't know what the deal is. I just heard that summer doesn't start until next weekend, but I thought it had been here for weeks. I mean, the summer idol MVs started dropping in late May, and the last couple of weeks have definitely felt like summer concert season. Now that I got my mind right, let's see what's been happening while we gear up to kick off summer for real:

New idol live announcements for the US and Europe and more in The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #446 Banner Image: WACK in the UK Vol. 6, Day 2. It was, and continues to be, a big week for overseas idol lives. WACK in the UK was, again, the site of significant idol milestones including yesterday's Western debut of ZOCX, PIGGS, and MAPA. A highlight for the ages featured Pour Lui, Megumi Coshoji, and Oomorii Seiko coming together to sing the BiS classic, "primal."

It's been a week of idol firsts all dutifully documented in The Weekender.

Your Homicidols Weekender #445 Banner image: Kingsari. School's out (for those of you in school) and it's time to kick off the summer! There is no better way to do that than to go check out a live idol show. Luckily for (some of) us, this upcoming week features many, many opportunities to see idols live in at least four different countries across two Western continents. Is an idol appearing in a town near you? Lets see:

Idols are everywhere this week! See if one is coming to a town near you in The Weekender.

Homicidols Best MVs of 2025 (so far) Today marks the exact half-way point of Homicidols Year 2025 and we're dropping part three of our series on what Team Homicidols and the denizens of the Homicidols Discord server believe are contenders for Best of the Year recognition (so far). We previously went over Best Singles and Best Albums and EPs, so this one is all about the music videos.

Homicidols Best MVs of 2025 (so far)