Nowhere Girl

I always assumed they just threw a tape on. Is it really live?

Possibly, although people have been saying that since THE FINAL.

Although we know these aren't the real titles, I would actually believe it could belong around the Kisou era, back when Kyo was still wearing MAD STALIN shirts etc.

This is true, but I don't think it's a coincidence at all. Most likely, the song is generically about the horrors of war rather than being specific to a situation or people.

Well, the artwork for that album was taken during World War 2. Perhaps Grief is about the suffering of the Jewish people under the Nazi regime.

I can't wait for the year-long gap between this meagre single and the full LP.

It'll probably surface sometime in the next two weeks. Release date is 25th April, which is almost no time at all.

Looks like Kyo stuck his hand in Ghostbusters slime or perhaps just a green septic tank after snorting fermented faecal matter. Toshiya just escaped the set of a live-action Castlevania movie. Kaoru is 100% sure his taste in fashion is good (but it's not). Why does his make-up always look so dreadful? Die just auditioned for bishounen of the month. Shinya looks the exact fucking same.

Totally agree. Best album since ARCHE for sure. Much meta in concept. So memes. It's good to see them poking fun at themselves for a change instead of taking everything so seriously. My personal favourite tracks are 'Self-Indulgent Pretentiousness' and 'WE MADE VK BRÖÖTAL'. I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that 'Another Song About Suicide' is absolutely the greatest album closer they've done to date, seconded only by Taiyou no Ao. The cover of TOOL's 'Maynard's Dick' is just icing on the cake. Even though 75% of this album is just remakes, I still feel it'll go down as one of DEG's finest works. Hearing the entirety of Lindbergh's speech in the new MASK is especially poignant, especially after the crushing brutality of the new shovel-djent version of Zakuro. Don't know about you guys, but I absolutely love that they gave The Domestic Fucker Family the JEALOUS -reverse- treatment. I wonder if they would have performed 'INWARD SCREAM pt. 524' live the same way as it appears on the album or whether they'd have just continued on with 525 in the next show. Shame we'll never know. The coolest thing is that if you take all 523 previous INWARD SCREAMs and play them back-to-back at 325 times the speed, they actually make a demo of this song. It's sad we'll never see them live again. But hey, I guess being on the road for over 20 years will do that to a band. I'm happy we were able to get one final great effort from them before they disbanded.

Question is, will we get the artwork or the 9 second preview first?

As someone who has dabbled in both live and electronic music production, it is often way faster and easier to get a talented drummer to do a few takes for 15-20 minutes than to not only paint every single drum hit into a DAW but also to painstakingly alter the velocity, panning, reverb, EQ, etc of each hit so it sounds real. Perhaps Kai was having issues in his personal life that prevented him from being present in the studio.

If it's not on direngrey.co.jp, it's not up yet.

That was fucking horrible. Please learn to scream in time with the music and invest in some at least semi-decent audio recording equipment. Even my 8 year-old phone has better quality than that.

Basically this. The thing about DEG is that they've been around for 20 years now. Fans started listening in different eras and have their own reasons for listening. Someone who becomes a fan now may not necessarily enjoy the VK early material, and vice versa for the ooga-booga-moar-br00tal-than-thou-kyopera we have now. There's not really much of a point of me making a ranked list, as it changes constantly with my mood. I like almost all their work equally aside from MISSA, which just doesn't work for me on the whole. Oh, and UROBOROS is basically a god-tier LP, imo.

They did the same for DSS. They beat that horse well after it was dead. Tbh, I would have preferred to see other songs rather than just pure ARCHE. Nothing against the album, it's just that we got a very similar Blu-Ray with the Utafumi single a few years ago.

Wow, that's lazy... But tbh I don't own any Mode of... Blu-Rays, so I'm happy to at least have a part of that era physically.

Hyped. Of course, you might all be right and it'll suck, but I'd like to reserve judgement until after I've heard the music.

Couldn't make it more than a few seconds in. I guess they tried? Looking forward to hearing some more news about this single. Hopefully they'll actually tell us what's on it soon enough. It's a bit weird that they usually don't finalise the tracklisting and artwork until only a few weeks before. Surely it takes a while to print thousands of discs?

There's been a lot of negativity in this thread recently (not sure if troll or not). Just throwing my hat in the ring with some positive (but hopefully fair) mini-reviews. You do not have to agree with my opinion. GAUZE: Slightly awkward in places. Much of this is generic for a VK band. Unlike almost anything later, this is basically a true Visual Kei album, with strong pop hooks, light, bouncy instrumentals, and some exceptions. Mazohyst is the first sign that the band want to go conceptual, epic, and darker than their peers. The Mode of... tracks do little more than just exist, possibly a throwback to La:Sadie's or perhaps Malice Mizer. I find Schwein no Isu and MASK very forgettable. ZAN is gigantic; the remake doesn't stand up to Kyo's insanity in the original version, yet it makes up for it by being br00tal (or something). Also, the video for Yokan is fucking hot. Fav track: アクロの丘 MACABRE: This album is the seed of what is to come. It's almost a proto-UROBOROS in its concept, yet maintains the playful pop of GAUZE enough that it isn't totally bleak. You can tell that they wanted this album to be truly epic, but their immaturity as a band means that it doesn't quite hit that mark. It's still great, though. The only song I'd lose here is audrey (too predictable/tedious). Fav track: egnirys cimredopyh +) an injection ain't afraid to die: Just this one song alone is better than many albums out there. Glorious. Kisou: I guess some people love this and some loathe it. For me, it's the former. This is the first time we see DEG try something totally new. It's like Experimental Industrial Electronic Punk; really raw and in your face. The amount of sonic variety means that there should be something here for everyone. The interludes are cool, although I can see why maybe they're disliked. I'd say that this album is almost perfect, with only The Domestic Fucker Family being weirdly out of place. Oh, and PINK KILLER is amazing. Fav track: 鴉-karasu- six Ugly: Strangely, there are two remakes here, with Children being only 2 years old at the time. However, everything here is good. Excellent, in fact. It'd be cool to see Hades back in the live show. Fav track: HADES VULGAR: OBSCURE is enormous. That's not to say that this is the only reason to listen to the album. When this first came out, I was a little disappointed, as every track sounded more or less the same (just guitars, barely any electronics unlike Kisou). It quickly grew on me, though. There's very little to dislike here (at a stretch, maybe Sajou no Uta is a tad forgettable). At this point, there's almost none of the old DEG sound left. Fav track: NEW AGE CULTURE Withering to death.: I was so not excited when this was announced and I have no idea why. I dithered on the purchase until I heard a clip of 愛しさは腐敗につき, and then instabought it just for that song. Wow, this thing is great. Some people criticise the production (it sounds too clean?), although it seems fine to me. This is a return to a more playful aesthetic for the band that I still really wish they'd touch back on. Aside from the rather blah Jesus Christ R 'n R, this album is solid. dead tree to the end is basically perfect. Yes, even Beautiful Dirt. Yes, even GARBAGE. Love this thing. Fav track: Spilled Milk THE MARROW OF A BONE: Weird Engrishy titles, weird Engrishy lyrics, Kyo's voice steadily getting worse with each successive live, and the band just suddenly went very dark and angry. This album turned a lot of people away from the band. I listened once and almost threw away the CD. Didn't listen to the band for months. Then I gave it a second try, and it made sense. I spent an entire Summer listening to nothing but this while painting. It was truly something else. Yes, it's messy, ugly, and raw as fuck, but that was the point. It's grotesque and Kyo sounds like a cat in a blender. But alongside all this rage, we have moments of utter spellbinding beauty, too; songs that are some of the highlights of DEG's entire career up until this point. Just fantastic. My only complaint might be that some of it feels a little undercooked. A little repetitive, perhaps. But it feels honest and true in its message. Fav track: 艶かしき安息、躊躇いに微笑み UROBOROS: Hoo, boy. This one. This is the album that MACABRE wanted to be, but wasn't. It's also possibly the most complicated album in terms of song structure and writing techniques. This thing is an absolute beast; a monster. In my opinion, this may be the band's finest moment. Every track here has a reason to exist. It's marvellous. Possibly my favourite album next to Kisou. The initial release was plagued by slightly dodgy mixing (didn't notice how bad it was at the time). Another big problem with the original version was the inclusion of the atrocious English versions of Glass Skin and DOZING GREEN. The remaster fixes these things, but also adds in the remake HYDRA 666 for absolutely no reason. It doesn't really fit and already had its place on the single. Fav track: VINUSHKA DUM SPIRO SPERO: Thought UROBOROS was complex? Think again! Here, the band decided to cram as many ideas as they possibly could into each song, resulting in some completely bizarre Frankenstein's monster of an LP. This is the sort of album that you could probably hear something different in every time you listened. In the studio, it works very, very well, but live, the album falls short, with the band's meagre 5-piece unable to fully re-create the enormous sound they created with computer magic. This album is good, but it's also quite bleak, dreary, and at times a little tedious. It tries to push the UROBOROS idea too hard and goes a bit off the deep end, for better or for worse. This was also the time where the band's output became glacial. Hageshisa to... was released two years prior to this, and I was already bored of it when the album finally came out (and the mixing was terrible). Also, side note: the 'symphonic' versions are absolutely rubbish. They should have hired an orchestra or some actual performers to play with them (not necessarily on stage). Also, second side-note: this is the beginning of the polarising 'Kyopera'. Fav track: 「欲巣にDREAMBOX」あるいは成熟の理念と冷たい雨 ARCHE: On the surface, this is a return to the band's old sound... sort of. It's like looking through a gloomy telescope at that old material and reminiscing on it. I'd say this is more mature, more measured. Less spontaneous. It's really very good. I have absolutely no complaints here. Fav track: 濤声 TL;DR: I am a Dir en grey fan and I like the band's music. So there.

There is no one way to play a particular genre. Labels only exist as guidelines. DEG's early material wears its influences on its sleeve. They clearly wanted to be just like their heroes. Perhaps the inspiration is a bit too overt in some cases. They very quickly moved on from this phase, but it still shows.

This utterly confounds me. However, I can respect your opinion. I was under the impression that the vast majority of fans felt that their early work was their best. Personally, I enjoy each album for different reasons. Part of the appeal of this band is how they've evolved so much over their years. Their sound pallet is varied to the extent that they can throw a song like Namamekashiki ansoku... in the middle of the angriest album they've made to date, and it still makes sense.

But I agree that OLD old DEG (2 or 3 songs off GAUZE, all of MISSA, and earlier) is a bit janky. Please don't kill me. How 'old' are we talking here? Because imo, almost everything from MACABRE on is great. Edit: I got into DEG because of ain't afraid to die, which is fairly ancient at this point. If that song is considered "awful", then I don't even know what to say.

Looking at the cover, all I see is: NoOOoOOOOOoOoOooOoooOooOoOoOoOooOoOoOOOOOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoo Or just 'NOO'.

I am relatively certain it will be pretentiously sombre as usual.

I feel completely alone in loving the NARASAKI remix. But then, as I've said before, I enjoy industrial/ambient/noise music. Kyo's remix is excellent, too. The song is kind of a mess live, I will give you that. But that's true for almost everything off DSS. I wish they had gone for live orchestral elements (even on tape) rather than programmed samples for the Symphonic versions. They sound so fake.