The accessible idol has cultural ramifications far beyond the stage upon which girls and boys sing and dance for your happiness. They are on TV. They are at shopping malls and public plazas. And yes, they are in your coffee shops and restaurants. In the form of maids, maid cafes are cartoonish coffee shops staffed by girls in frilly maid outfits who serve sweet drinks and cakes and… do other things. Among these other things is singing and dancing.1 Yes. Just like idols. The male equivalent is the butler cafe, but I do not know if they sing and dance, too.2
The maids face similar restrictions on weight, demands on their ability to maintain their image on the cafe floor, and have to perform what is called “magic time,” where they put a “spell” on the food or drink the customer ordered. They often have safeguards in place where they can enter and leave the building housing their cafe away from the public eye, and surgical masks are a bonus disguise to help hide their private life identities, just in case a customer tries to turn into a stalker. It is enough to drive one mad.
Japan’s most famous maid is Kobato Miku. Kobato is a one-time maid cafe maid, failed idol, and the founding member of the “impossibly hard rocking maid band” BAND-MAID. She assembled the band through music industry contacts and had planned on being the lead singer herself, but as they rehearsed it quickly became evident that her voice was inadequate. Kobato wanted to succeed, not stroke her own ego and thus a new singer was sought. One of the members she had assembled, MISA3 the bassist I believe, “…knew a guy.” Enter Atsumi Saiki, a pop singer with a dance background. The story goes that she was told of a new gig in a rock band, but no one mentioned just what kind of rock band. So when she showed up and they gave her the maid outfit to wear she wanted to tell them to fuck off and then walk away. She put on the damn costume and stayed, however, and has provided high-octane vocals for them ever since. In return they have not made her put on another maid costume, instead allowing her elaborate, gothic-styled dresses instead. Kobato then dedicated herself to learning guitar, and plays Hetfield-level rhythm next to the only other member still wearing the maid costume, lead guitarist Tono Kanami. Hirose Akane completes the five-(wo)man-band as the gorilla on drums.4
The first three “mini-albums” they released are filled with largely forgettable, generic rock tracks. But there were enough bright spots to earn them some real fans, for those bright spots were supernovas. Most people’s first experience with the band and their ridiculous outfits was the video for “Thrill” on youtube. 23 million views in a genre dead compared to mumble rap is an astounding number, with the majority of those views in the mid 2010s upon their debut. It is the showcase for what would take them to international success: hard driving, straightforward, riff-heavy rock music. No synthesizer bullshit. No melodramatic vocals. They are more AC/DC than Evanescence.
Their fifth album (the third full one), World Domination, showed they were the real thing. It opens with Hirose beating the time on her cymbal for “I Can’t Live Without You,” a song that sets the rock-hard tone for the album to follow. The second song, “Play,” adds a bit of prog flavor, and even when they slow it down a bit for “Fate” and even more for “Daydreaming” and “Anemone” they are still thunder and lightning. They wrote and arranged the album almost entirely themselves (some assists by longtime collaborators, rock producers Akutsu (responsible for the banger “Turn Me On”) and Tienowaka, as well as a cover of a visual kei song at the end).
Conqueror is arguably better, with richer sounds and a more thoughtful tone, as exemplified by the vocal opening bars of “Page.” Atsumi gets a chance to shine in the soaring “Wonderland.” They worked with T-Rex and David Bowie producer Tony Visconti on the track “The Dragon Cries.” “Flying High,” “Bubble,” and “Catharsis” are not to be missed.
Their best album (and also their most hideous cover art) is Unseen World. Written and recorded during the Japanese government’s wuhanic plague freak out, it has a chaotic sound akin to Led Zeppelin’s Presence, which was similarly produced under duress. “Warning!” starts the album off with a pace that never relents, and indeed they are in pure attack mode in “I Still Seek Revenge” and “After Life.” “Black Hole” anchors the album at a blistering 220 BPM, and my favorite track “Chemical Reaction” is a freight train that took “More Cowbell” to heart.
Subsequent BAND-MAID releases have not been as strong as 2021’s Unseen World, but there are still many worthwhile tracks. The EP Unleash has the hard-driving “Influencer.” 2024 saw the release of Epic Narratives, which starts off with the face-melting killer riff of “Magie.” Can Tono play that live? You bet your ass she can. The rest of the album is more poppish, with lots of upbeat and uplifting stuff like the song “Bestie,” co-written by Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger. In interviews the members have expressed a desire to make people feel good with their music, and their lyrics tend to be on the positive side. A little taste of the idol background of Kobato showing through, perhaps. Most recently they dropped Scoooop, with the standout “Zen” and a sound that is more chaotic.
BAND-MAID is the best of the Japanese all-female rock/metal groups, but they are only the tip of the spear. On the harder edge is NEMOPHILA, a heavy metal band whose lead singer Mayu loves to scream. They rose to internet fame with covers of Western rock and metal songs, including “Separate Ways,” “Whole Lotta Rosie,” and “The Trooper.”5 They also enjoy converting other genres into heavy metal, taking idol group NiziU’s “Make You Happy” and proving that adding some heavy guitars and a solo can make almost any song better. They covered BABYMETAL’s “Megitsune,” a song about a tricky female fox (foxes are trickster gods of Japanese folklore) that has a distinctly Japanese sound. They are not just a fancy cover band. The quartet has four studio albums to their name along with two EPs. Standout tracks include the mighty “Life,” a chills-inducing ballad with a distinct 1980s flavor, ferocious “Raitei,” and pure, distilled metal “Oiran.”
BABYMETAL was bound to come up before too long, so let’s talk about them. I found them unbearable when they came out. The saccharine idol-style vocals makes them sound as though they belong in the previous article about the idols, and indeed they rose to fame alongside AKB48 in that wave of the idol boom. They also have a lot of serious metal fans, and other metal bands take them very seriously. But I still find their music unbearable and avoid them whenever possible. If you are looking for an in-depth, nuanced view of their work, I am not the man to give it to you.
Other groups whose work demands a more nuanced view: doll$box, Mary’s Blood, Trident, LOVEBITES, Aldious, Hanabie. LOVEBITES, Aldious, doll$box, and Mary’s Blood are melodramatic theater-kid-style gothic metal whose leading ladies sound like they would have been enka singers in a different era. If you enjoy Evanescence you might enjoy them as well. Trident is a hard-rocking trio, but they don’t cover any new ground and sound a little generic. Hanabie is a newer group that rests at the harder edge of metal, with a lot more screaming and growling than NEMOPHILA. One of NEMOPHILA’s guitarists was a former member of Mary’s Blood, but she has since left the band to pursue her own projects.
There is also SHOW-YA, an all-girl rock group from the 80s who are seeing a new wave of interest thanks to the above listed groups’ popularity. Their sound is a little more Poison than Van Halen, so I never really got into them.
There are countless generic pop-rock girl groups as well. SCANDAL is the most popular of these. All the members are pretty and polished, like an idol group. Yes, they play their own instruments, and I guess they do it well, but they sound very much like a I-IV-V-VI pop-rock band… because they are. Despite being entirely forgettable their good looks have provided them with a long career.
Akai Koen was of a similar casting, only the members were quite a bit more ordinary in their appearance. They had the outstanding single “Highway Cabriolet,” an atmospheric love song with an enhanced echo effect to the main guitar riff that stands out above all the other music in this genre. The bassist killed herself during the lockdowns and they split up. The lead singer, of course also a former idol, now fronts AOOO, and what they’ve released has at least not been boring. We’ll talk more about the men in the next installment.
The singing and dancing is at 24:10 in the video.
If you’re looking for yet OTHER THINGS there are hostess and host clubs where alcohol and dizzying sums of money are involved in exchange for glimpses of thigh/a strong shoulder to lean on and/or fawning praise, and soaplands and “delivery health” courses catering to both sexes and all sexualities where you can skirt right on by Japan’s anti-prostitution laws.
MISA plays bass both slapping and picking. When performing live, she’ll tuck the pick under her forefinger to slap, and then seemlessly flick the pick out when she needs to. Her slaps don’t suffer for it.
She only started taking her drumming seriously after she turned 18 and enrolled at the Tokyo School of Music. She introduces herself at international shows as “Gorilla.” No less than Jimmy Page favorably compared her to John Bonham after catching their act in Tokyo several years back.
In May 2025 they performed a 4 hour live marathon of all their songs, this cover of “Master of Puppets” opened their second set.