EVERY GENRE PROJECT — April 27 — Kawaii Metal
Genre of the Day — Kawaii Metal
Album of the Day — Noisy Night Fever by Broken by the Scream (2019)
April 27, 2024
Metal is one of a handful of genres that gets unfairly pigeonholed to the point where many people don’t consider its internal diversity and just how much variation it has to offer. Less than a week ago, we had the quirky funk metal grace our page. Today, we’re greeted by another special metal fusion, from Japan. We’ve experienced Japanese hardcore, and I learned that metal and hard rock are relatively important niches in Japan because of how deeply rooted social code is: it’s a rare and particularly cathartic creative and social space, so metal musicians lean in extra hard, taking it to new extremes and fusing it with other beloved aesthetics like kawaii.
While kawaii and metal might seem like they lie on two opposite sides of an emotional spectrum, they’re really both extremes. Kawaii stands as an almost absurd bastion of extreme cuteness and a Technicolor vision of life, and metal stands at the fullest, heaviest extreme of rock music’s emotional and sonic textures. They’re both willing to go one step further with fashion and music as art forms, so it logically tracks that the two could intersect more than you’d expect. Additionally, where metal can act as a safe space for those needing catharsis and release from particularly scarring wounds, one of kawaii’s proposed instinctual bases is the “pity for things loved and protected”, which indicates an underlying instinct of protectiveness. Even if you’re not willing to accept the intersection, the perceived tension between the two genres makes for a satisfying surprise when you hear voracious growls over glam-rock influenced J-pop melodies.
Kawaii metal draws heavily on the aesthetics of J-pop groups that are much more ubiquitous in the country, making it a very pop-indebted metal sound. But make no mistake: the sharp-as-a-knife musical stylings of metal aren’t eschewed whatsoever. These artists can go toe for toe growling, thrashing, and mashing the strings of their guitars with any other metal subgenre. Today’s group even visually presents more like a J-pop group, so you really have to tap in musically to discover what lies beneath. Once you hear the first growl when you put this record to wax, any expectations for what an all-female J-pop group is will be blown away. Pioneered by groups like BABYMETAL, these bands take the evocative, colorful melodies of J-pop and fuse them with fast, blown up guitar hurricanes.
Today’s album by Broken by The Scream wastes no time digging into the hard-hitting fusion. Opener “アイハキミノモノ” flips around on a neck-breaking approximate ten-second basis between a more glam rock-indebted pop sound and metal thrash complete with the first growls we’re blessed to hear. A few songs later, “KI・RA・I !!” sees that same undeniably hard snarling applied over a sparkling keyboard breakdown. On certain songs, it feels as if Godzilla himself walked into the studio session of a K-pop and began ecstatically harmonizing with the singers, but somehow it manages to rarely sacrifice synergy for pure shock value: there’s a consistent synchronicity between the disparate musical parts, as growls jump octaves with the same agility as the more conventional vocals alongside showy guitar solos. It’s a marriage of sweetness and darkness that’s hard to find as strikingly different yet as balanced as here: it’s not often you get to simultaneously head bang while doing a little choregraphed dance number.
