If this is in the wrong category I’d request someone to move it to a more appropriate cat, and apologies in advance.
So yesterday I thought about Yohio and Seremedy and it brought me down a bit of a pipeline of foreign VK bands. I’ve listened to some of these bands, such as Disreign, Seremedy, Die/May, Kogure, Junction Skies, etc. Some of the bands are pretty good and actually sound sort of VK, and some a bit less so obviously.
Another thing that’s hard not to notice is how polarizing these bands are. I even remember back in the day it would be common to hate on these bands. Seremedy received quite a lot of hate back when they started to build an audience back in around 2010 and it’s hard not to believe the main reason for this was because people find foreign VK bands cringey.
On the positive side, bands like Seremedy received quite a good amount of popularity and I’d imagine the reasons for this likely were:
- They’re relatable to many of us. I’d imagine some of us can see a bit of ourselves in them.
- Many of these bands sing in English, and many people enjoy hearing lyrics they immediately understand.
- They’re often much more accessible.
I honestly have a lot of respect for these bands for a couple reasons. For one it’s very rare to meet people who even care about VK in the first place, let alone enough to start a VK band which not only takes some level of skill but a tremendous amount of BRAVERY on top of it, and when most westerners think of Japanese music they think of anime openings. On top of that the average VK fan I witness is more of a surface fan who seems more interested in the aesthetic of VK than the actual song structure of a VK song.
But anyways, I’m just curious what your opinions on these type of bands are.