Awe thanks!
Truth is, I don’t have time for it anymore. I set out with the goal of creating good discussion within the Reviews forum. I didn’t like the way reviews were “”“”“written”“”“” back in the day, and I put that in generous quotes. Users could only discuss new releases in polemic terms, as if the only numbers we were allowed to use were 1-3 and 7-10. A one liner of “This release sucks, 8/10” was not an uncommon thing. Discussion now is much better, if less frequent, because people take the time to explain why they feel what they feel and maybe leave off the number rating when it doesn’t make sense.
If you’re asking what bands in 2023 are worth listening to, the answer is nothing you haven’t already heard. HUMAN ERROR? Dokuga? JILUKA? peach? You probably know more than I do. I find it a disturbingly common trend that a new band is announced, releases a few releases with low reach, and then goes on hiatus forever. It’s also undeniable that at this time bands are more focused on domestic activities. Streaming also changed the game, and I’m starting to find it moderately difficult to get my hands on files of my own unless I buy myself. All these things come together to shrink the pipeline.
I swear I’m not hiding new visual kei bands under my trench coat, it’s just that new bands are a) less common and b) a step down from the quality of a decade ago. DazzlingBAD is not iT. Feels like a lot of senior leadership left the scene and no one is mentoring the youngins. That’s part of the reason why I’m so excited at this wave of 2010 bands revivals - we could definitely use the leadership! When ZigZag is your chief export, perhaps the scene needs to have a serious conversation with itself (this isn’t a dig at ZigZag, but rather how they’re able to come up so easily in their kid-friendly niche because other bands are flopping. Hard.).
I also find the visual adjacent scene more active and refreshing than visual kei at the moment. You get all the pomp and melodrama of visual kei, still sung in Japanese, except these bands just don’t claim visual kei. Ironically, I find that scene way more diverse than visual kei, even though we dote endlessly on how diverse the scene is. Lots of cool bands in there like UROBOROS, Unlucky Morpheus, DUSTZ, Ancient Myth, QUEEN BEE, etc. Went over like ten of them in another topic here.
Idol groups also falls into this category, since @colorfuljinsei has also described how there are some ties between visual kei and idol metal, even if the two don’t seem immediately connected. But then again, visual kei is just boy band metal, and idol groups are girl band metal, so it’s not that much of a reach. But yeah stuff like BABYMETAL, Aldious, BAND-MAID, HANABIE, etc. all sit here.
There are even times when doujin-aligned bands like Imperial Circus Dead Decadence and Vermillion-D Alice Syndrome sound more visual kei than current visual kei bands, so it’s all a matter of what you’re looking for.
Bonus round: This is probably my favorite release of 2023, and it’s a cross over between visual and non-visual artists that I never anticipated.
