Hi! Welcome to Idol Watch, a bi-monthly companion newsletter to This Side of Japan that’s all about Japanese idols! .

Since 2025 began, Hello! Project has been making their past catalog available on Spotify, a few collection of artists and groups at a time. The most recent batch saw the music from the three in Gomatto—Maki Goto, Aya Matsuura and Miki Fujimoto—as solo acts and in their respective groups. For the big occasion of music by some of the most iconic idols of the 2000s being made accessible online, I dug up a Tumblr draft from about 5 years ago about “SHALL WE LOVE,” the debut single by Gomatto, to lightly introduce what the three was all about. The angle here will be more Ayaya-centric since this was originally intended for a botched blog project to write about every Aya Matsuura single. Here’s the post in a much edited form:

The same voice behind the love-struck girl in “Momoiro Kataomoi” sings in “SHALL WE LOVE?,” but she hardly sounds like the same person. Aya Matsuura had recently premiered the defining piece to her iconography: the all-pink, leather cowboy get-up seen in the video of “Momoiro Kataomoi” in 2002. But joined by solo breakout Maki Goto and newcomer Miki Fujimoto both from her company Hello! Project in the newly formed subunit Gomatto, the once-bubbly idol now takes on a fierce persona whose anxieties are intensified by an equally stern R&B production.

If Ayaya sounds out of character while navigating the zigzagging music of “SHALL WE LOVE?” she’s partly trying to fill a spot that didn’t originally exist in the song: the Hello! Pro chose to debut the trio with a record first intended as a solo track for Goto. R&B may not have been entirely out of Ayaya’s realm: a recent single of hers was a wintry hip-hop slow jam accented with weepy synth squeals nicked from G-funk. But the Y2K-embedded R&B of “SHALL WE LOVE?” is a style rightfully associated best with Goto in retrospect. Echoing the productions from teen-pop acts of the time like BoA’s, dramatic string hits, chirpy synths and skittering drum beat followed a palette already adopted for singles like “Ai No Bakayaro.”

But while the dramatic music inspires a different kind of performance than what’s typical from Ayaya, “SHALL WE LOVE?” is driven by a similar kind of play on extremes as the idol’s solo songs. Rather than dial up the bubbliness, the Gomatto track blows up the melancholy of youth into maudlin highs and lows. “Let’s break up / let’s stay together / I love you / I hate you,” Ayaya and Goto sing after exposing their partners’ infidelity. It’s pure teen drama in how it recreates the tug-of-war between their head and heart but while keeping their teenage naivete tied to their heartbreak. They reiterate how they know more than what their young age lets on yet it’s endearing how big a crater it leaves their small, age-restricted world, where dates happen at family restaurants and movie theaters. (Please also enjoy the opening skit to the music video, where Goto plays the frustrated girlfriend.)

Perhaps if they had continued on, the trio would have produced a single lighter in personality than the serious girl-drama R&B of “SHALL WE LOVE?” A song in line with the silliness of Ayaya’s or the sunniness of Miki Fujimoto’s solo releases, or simply in a style outside of Goto’s. But Gomatto only produced one single. While a collaboration between three idol powerhouses seem brilliant on paper, they perhaps clashed too much in practice: Goto eventually opened up about how she and Ayaya first hated each other. The three would cross paths with each other again during their time in Hello! Project in some form—Ayaya and Mikity later worked together as another duo GAM for a year—though not as this exact line-up. Everyone involved would rather focus on their own solo music than the group at the time. But what a side project it was.

And here are some of my favorite idol singles from January and February!

“neon” by diig [ekoms.inc]

Following up their debut single from last fall, diig quickly stake out a sound of their own in “neon.” The group’s initial launch gestured to their direct lineage to Qumali Depart with the songs adopting a scrambled dempa sound similar to their elder sister group in ekoms. The glitching electro-pop of “Neon” instead swaps the parade of toy instruments for a motherboard gone haywire. If you can still hear faint echoes to their predecessors, it’s likely in the arrangement’s frazzled touch—a signature of sorts for ekoms head Kenta Sakurai since maison book girl, even if he’s not behind the boards. Busy as the song gets in its synth work, it doesn’t forget to bake in a sweet chorus as if to remind this is after all an idol-pop single.

Listen to it on Spotify.

“Lie Lie Lie Lie” by MYERA [BLACK GOAT]

Heard about every time I recently opened TikTok, that bam-bam BAM bam! hook got me coming back to this single by a group featuring former contestants of survival shows responsible for ME:I and ILLIT. What follows scans as cliche #confident stuff often heard atop these kind of street-preppy hip-hop idol tracks: “So this is me, that’s me,” they bang on in the chorus about how they got nothing to hide. But that sense of wordplay hinted in its hook shows up all throughout “Lie Lie Lie Lie,” the idols tossing in tons of mesmerizing syllabic combos without distracting from the message at hand. MYERA hopefully serves us more of this going forward as they level their stay-true preaching with pop levity while exuding a kind of rapper cool.

Lie Lie Lie Lie / Be Naked is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.

See also: “zigy=zigy” by cosmosy; “Reset ‰  Reboot” by ELSEE

“Ubugoe Ni Waltz Wo” by Tonalia [Increption]

“Ubugoe Ni Waltz Wo” teems with life as Tonalia apply a whimsical, kitchen-sink flourish to their dreamy pop. As if the baroque arrangement didn’t stuff enough, tumbling piano chords and glittery strings fill any leftover space with so many small yet tactile sounds flashing as quick, explosive bursts. If you managed to discarded all the extra bits, “Ubugoe Ni Waltz Wo” might resemble the kind of idol Shibuya-kei enamored with ye-ye like, say, the regal countryside pop of WASUTA’s “Kimi To Tea for Two.” But the magic of Tonalia lies in how all of the commotion in the production warps every pop style that strikes their fancy into something unrecognizable.

Listen to it on Spotify.

See also: “Nominee” by CYNHN; “Lostword Syndrome” by may in film

“Chiheisen Wo Miteiruka?” by STU48 [King]

From the forlorn melody to the folk-pop arrangement, “Chiheisen Wo Miteiruka?” flashes back to the golden age of idol kayo when Aku Yu cut many classics. The mournful music draws out the song’s break-up melodrama in a classic fashion: “Oh, memories, don’t get in the way of the skies of our future,” STU48 sigh in the chorus with poetic lyricism as they prepare to go separate ways. For all the developments done for the music of the 46/48 groups to freshen up their sound to compete with current-day acts, Yasushi Akimoto reminds again and again that he can easily deliver the goods by mining from the days of the Showa era when he first cut his teeth as a lyricist.

Chiheisen Wo Miteiruka? is out now. Listen to it on Spotify.

See also: “Koi Wa Baisoku” by Boku Ga Mitakatta Aozora; “Sotsugyo Shashin Dakega Shitteiru” by Hinatazaka46

“Procraaa” by AYU OKUDA [ASOBIMUSIC]

Ayu Okuda has been sharing singles on YouTube as if they’re demos surreptitiously uploaded straight from her laptop—so fresh off the press, they still got the file format attached in their titles. And an under-the-radar aura particularly comes through “Procraa.” Some of it inevitably comes from the proximity of the very singer to the production style here: the introverted jungle-fused pop reminiscent of Nia Archives sounds far out from the sphere of the bubbly funk heard from her main gig in SWEET STEADY, one of the many groups from KAWAII LAB. But the bedroom-pop approach to a dark sound rooted in underground raves also simply evokes an alluring mystique in Okuda as an artist, like she’s moonlighting as an anonymous clubber crashing the waves of pirate radio.

Listen to it on Spotify.

“Bi*Tansan Cherry” by Electric Ribbon [Kanpai]

Electric Ribbon whip up a modern take on the Akishibu sound for “Bi*Tansan Cherry.” Crude, chiptune synths of Akiba-kei meets the kitchen-sink arrangements and airy lounge-pop vocals of Shibuya-kei like it’s 2005, though the meticulous beat chops seem done from a deft hand arranging slick future-bass tracks to be uploaded on SoundCloud. The song is shaken up as J-pop born from any of those ingredients can be, and the softly caffeinated feel runs so appropriate for an idol-pop single titled “light sparkling cherry”: “Feeling lucky finding a sweetness that won’t go away / I want a love like that,” the idols sing about the titular feeling that they think is about to bubble up into something more. This combo of fuzzy-sweet beats and lyrics from Electric Ribbon impressed back when they flirted with the nascent sound of J-electro in 2008; it still makes for a treat more than a decade later.

Listen to it on Spotify.

“TOUTOI” by ukka [TEICHIKU]

The buzzword title suggests ukka following the aesthetics adopted on their last outing that was a more bashful take on the bubbly Lolita pop of Kyururin te Shitemite. While the group aligns their sound more to LDH than Dear Stage and Kawaii Lab this time with a zipping synth-R&B production made for an icy-cool dance unit, “TOUTOI” seems guided by a similar fishing-for-Likes direction: when the beat cuts off and the idols spell out the titular hook, it seems ready-made to create a moment to just self-indulge while embracing the buzzword—precious—as a self-compliment. Yet if you read along, it comes to light that a question mark actually dangles after the title, revealing any confidence and self-obsession to come from the music to be a part of an act. Despite the camera-ready gestures in “TOUTOI,” ukka only hopes to live up to the image of perfection you might see in them on other side of the screen.

Listen to it on Spotify.

See also: “Sweetie, Lovely, Yummy” by AMEFURASSHI; “Bitter Nectar” by ONE LOVE ONE HEART

“Sleeping Dirty” by Zenbu Kimi No Seida [codomomental]

As the genre play goes, “Sleeping Dirty” is the most straight-up metal song Zen Kimi has made since the group’s reboot last fall. Heavy, chugging guitars strike out as the main dish instead of one of many tossed-in materials in an electro-rock arrangement like the one from two singles ago. The electronic touches meanwhile bubble up like a glitch from an interrupted version update: guitars and drums sound corrupted from a crunchy, gabber-fying distortion effect that pulls the music more into a plane of current mainstream metal. If this makes Zen Kimi’s return to metal is hard to say—for one, have they even been “metal idols” this decade? But “Sleeping Dirty” scratches an old itch that got me curious about the group in the first place.

Listen to it on Spotify.

See also: “VanilLament” by Not Secured, Loose Ends

“Hatsukoi No Bourei” by Juice=Juice [UP-FRONT WORKS]

Juice=Juice’s recent anthems about moving on from heartbreak with resilience sound inspiring, though I dream often for the return of the break-up blues once heard in their older tunes. Fortunately for me, the Hello! Project group’s new one indulges in R&B melodrama found in a resigned ode to unrequited love like “Bitansan.” But whereas the latter song doled out the stinging pain of discovering that your crush likes someone else before the relationship ever bloomed, this one deals with the haunting aftereffects from an expired love whose feelings should have been long exhumed. “The ghost of first love / won’t you disappear already,” the idols lament in the titular chorus, their voices ringing powerful yet so hopeless.

Hatsukoi No Bourei / Konya Wa Hearty Party is out now.

See also: “Ah, Kimi Ni Tensei” by BEYOOOOONDS; “Watashi Premium” by GOODM!X PREMIUM

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And Let’s Hear It from the Boys! January/February Favorites from Male Idols

• BUDDiiS - “Iris”

• MAZZEL - “J.O.K.E.R.”

• Nana Chronicle - “Hoshizora Elegy”

• PSYCHIC FEVER - “What’s Happenin’”

• Ryosuke Yamada - “SWITCH”

• SixTones - “Barrier”

• Snow Man - “S.B.Y.”

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