I've never seen a show like a BABYMETAL show -Oli
ーOli, It's been a while since you saw BABYMETAL perform on stage live, what did you think of the show this time around? They’re in the midst of a massive world tour and gaining a lot of momentum as a band.
Oli: It was sick. I think the main thing that I took away was, when we go and perform our show, I'm very demanding of the crowd. I'm always asking for mosh pits or circle pits or kind of just giving the crowd a hard time if they're not going crazy enough. Whereas when I watch BABYMETAL, they don't have to say or do anything. Everyone's circle pitting, everyone's throwing their fist in the air. Like complete unison, it's really quite hypnotic to watch. It's such a crazy juxtaposition to see the girls on stage doing their dance and doing everything else and then have the whole audience in complete chaos. But it seemed like a very organized chaos compared to when we play. Especially watching them at the Tokyo show where nobody was sitting down, it was just seas of people. I was at the back watching so I could see the whole crowd behind the sound desk and even right at the back, there were people doing circle pits in their own world. I've never seen a show like a BABYMETAL show, there's nothing quite like it. It's completely different to anything else in the metal or rock world, so it's just always really, really fun to watch and really inspiring.
ーBABYMETAL, how do you feel about seeing Bring Me The Horizon live up close for the first time in a while? The word "NEX" in NEX_FEST is linked to the upcoming new EP "POST HUMAN: NeX GEn", and I think the concept comes through both in the sound and the live performance.
SU-METAL: It's been a while since I saw them perform so it was so exciting to see them perform the songs as a fan, too. During the pandemic, when things weren't going well, I was listening to a lot of Bring Me The Horizon’s music and it really helped me get through those darker moments. So watching their shows, it was great to see the diversity of their songs, the range of songs was so wide that it was hard to believe that it was a live performance by a single band.
MOAMETAL: I had so much fun. Bring Me The Horizon has a massive catalog by now but it's cool that they don’t actually play some of the more well-known songs like “medicine” that was used in a commercial here in Japan. The last song "LosT" is a mixture of pop and metal but at the same time they also played earlier heavy and intense songs like “Chelsea Smile.” The difference between those two songs is amazing so I think there aren't many other artists that can go through these extremes and challenge themselves while making the crowd go crazy. As a fellow music lover, I was proud to be on stage with them, and I was so happy that we were on stage together that I almost cried.
