Out Of This World…

BABYMETAL power up as they head for the stars on their most OTT album to date…

- Nick Ruskell

The Fox God works in mysterious ways. You will never be able to divine its motives, or realise what’s going on in the renarde deity’s celestial head until long after it’s happened. It means that, when trying to penetrate the secrecy surrounding BABYMETAL’s plans and movements, they have a much better answer for ‘not telling you’ in ‘Only the Fox God knows’ than that usual lame get-out: ‘I’m just the drummer, nobody ever tells me anything.’ But, more importantly, it also means that BABYMETAL operate on a different set of rules than any other band on Earth. The departure of one-third of the band’s line-up last year, with YUIMETAL officially becoming listed as ‘ex-member’ after an absence from touring, would normally invite loads of explaining, questions asked, and the possible drafting in of new members. Instead, the great bushytailed one in the sky enabled it to be simply absorbed as part of the ongoing BABYMETAL gospel, and business continues as usual.

Or, at least, usual for this band. For their third chapter, Foxy seems to have declared that remaining original members SU-METAL and MOAMETAL are to take metal beyond our frontiers and into outer space. And rather than seeming like an operation with a piece of the puzzle missing, Metal Galaxy fulfils its mission by being even more bonkers than anything you’ve heard from them before. Why bother writing an album with a few WTF? bits scattered throughout, when you can forge an entire record solely from them, and jettison anything not out of this world? Back in June, they pointed at where they were heading with the hyperactive PA PA YA!!. This is the most relatively straigh