BABYMETAL shows us how to be both kawaii and hardcore
Their cameo in a recent film, "Heavier Trip," imitates the band's real life experience shaking up the metal music scene
BABYMETAL during the making of "Heavier Trip."
Nikita Sevcov
Words by Andy Crump
About a half an hour into Heavier Trip, Finnish directors Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren’s sequel to their 2018 black metal comedy Heavy Trip, tradition clashes with modernity: heavy metal purist Xytrax (Max Ovaska), one of the film’s main characters, watches Japanese kawaii metal band BABYMETAL performing “Gimme Chocolate!!,” the third track from their 2015 self-titled album, to an adoring crowd, and he is disgusted.
“Just look at them,” he sneers to Oula (Chike Ohanwe), his bandmate in the “symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal” group Impaled Rektum. (It’s a long story. Just watch the first movie.) “They look ridiculous.”
That’s the pot calling the heavy metal kettle black. Xytrax wears corpse paint and ornate leather epaulettes; meanwhile, the ladies of BABYMETAL—SU-METAL, MOAMETAL, and MOMOMETAL—are adorned in costumes that weave Japanese gothic with punk lolita, like armor out of a futuristic sci-fi movie. Their getups are awesome. So’s their music. But Xytrax, ever the fusspot, can’t bring himself to admit he digs BABYMETAL’s aesthetic, much less their sound. When he realizes he’s unconsciously tapping his foot to the song as the band dances on stage, he abruptly stops and looks around wild-eyed, horrified he might be caught enjoying the show.
As punchlines go, Xytrax’s chagrin works like gangbusters in Heavier Trip’s context. But in this particular scene, art imitates life; his harsh, reflexive dismissal of BABYMETAL isn’t far off from the response the Japanese trio received when they debuted in the early 2010s. “When we started out 10 years ago, there weren't many women playing metal, and we were very young at that time,” SU-METAL (real name Suzuka Nakamoto) explains to JoySauce, “so we were often told that our music wasn't metal, just based on our appearance.” Sounds shockingly familiar, with one small difference: Real-life metalheads wrote off BABYMETAL without giving their music the time of day. Xytrax’s remarks are savage, but at least he listens first and slags them off second.
As BABYMETAL fans themselves, Laatio and Vidgren’s anecdotal experiences within the metal community support SU-METAL’s personal recollections. “BABYMETAL is a great example of a band that seems to divide opinions, especially among metal listeners,” Laatio says. That’s what inspired the duo to write BABYMETAL into their script in the first place. “Xytrax needed a band to secretly like and have trouble admitting it,” he adds. Every subsequent time Xytrax runs into the band, the admission gets a little easier; by the end, he’s borrowing their gear on Impaled Rektum’s behalf, for an impromptu show at Wacken. He even declares them his seventh favorite band.
Maybe BABYMETAL’s naysayers had the same reaction, once they actually heard the band’s work. “When we started performing at metal festivals overseas, we surprised metal fans with the contrast (between our appearance and sound), and made them think, ‘What is this music?! It's so fun!’” SU-METAL says. “So, I'm glad that we stuck to this style.” Defining that style for uninitiated listeners poses a challenge, though not an unwelcome one; the fusion of J-pop with power metal is surprisingly resistant to a succinct description. One moment, on any given track, BABYMETAL is metal, and just a moment later, they’re bubblegum pop or pop punk.
“Gimme Chocolate!!” is a thrashing anthem about the tension between chocolate cravings and weight-gain anxieties, and a great example of kawaii metal’s internal contradictions in tone, and how those contradictions produce stellar music. The track kicks off with the murmuring grind of fuzzed-up chord progressions and the crack of a snare drum; then, in come MOAMETAL and YUIMETAL, two of the band’s founding members, for the pre-chorus. (YUIMETAL, Yui Mizuno, left BABYMETAL in 2018 on account of health matters; MOMOMETAL, Momoko Okazaki, joined the group in 2023.) When SU-METAL arrives for the chorus itself, the effect is a bit like the sun brightening up a cloudy day. The song’s disposition changes into something faster, peppier, and cheerier, even if, as SU-METAL sings, “my weight worries me a bit these days.” Still, chocolate prevails.
That pronounced dichotomy recurs throughout BABYMETAL’s body of work, like “Awadama Fever,” from their sophomore record, Metal Resistance. It’s impossible to miss, much less to reconcile. What alchemy does BABYMETAL’s arrangement team possess that they’re capable of harmonizing metal with J-pop? The band was intended as a sort of spin-off from the now-disbanded Japanese idol girl group Sakura Gakuin, but grew into an independent entity in 2013 after Nakamoto—who was also a founding member of that group—“graduated” out of it. (Literally, she graduated junior high school, which meant she’d reached Sakura Gakuin’s age limits and consequently had to part ways with them.)
BABYMETAL performing on stage in the movie "Heavier Trip."
Nikita Sevcov
Back then, no such niche as “kawaii metal” existed. Key “Kobametal” Kobayashi, the music producer credited as its architect, wanted to make music “no one had heard before,” and landed on the idea of mixing J-pop melodies into heavy metal’s categorical breadth—not only power metal, but industrial metal, black metal, and speed metal.
Thus, kawaii metal, and BABYMETAL, were born. Appropriately, the band’s name refers to the birth of a brand new musical subgenre, a status reflected by SU-METAL, MOAMETAL, and YUIMETAL’s collective unfamiliarity with metal at the time of the band’s formation. It was as much a curiosity to them as BABYMETAL was to global metal audiences. In other regions, it’d seem counterintuitive to hire singers for your gestating heavy metal band who don’t actually listen to the genre. But metal isn’t terribly popular in Japan, or Asia writ large. The continent’s chief musical exports trend toward hip-hop and pop. The tally of metal acts that call Asia home, like Ryujin, Bloodywood, Wakkabi Band, Wormrot, and OU, are practically outliers—even in 2024, when Asian metal’s stock has arguably never been higher. Just this past June, BABYMETAL’s recent single “Ratatata” hit the top spot on Billboard’s hard rock digital song sales chart—a first.
As big of a deal as that achievement is, it isn’t necessarily evidence that heavy metal music is gaining ground in Asia, according to MOAMETAL, Moa Kikuchi. “There aren't many people doing it,” she says, “and it seems that there are still many people who think metal is just such intense and scary music.” She highlights the Asian metal festival circuit as a hurdle for easing the stigma; such events are rare, and the ones that do take off manage only a fraction of the crowd at a place like Wacken. Hammersonic, Asia’s largest metal festival, saw about 30,000 attendees at this year’s edition (according to Heavy Mag). Wacken saw a whopping 85,000.
But size doesn’t necessarily correlate with enthusiasm, which audiences at shows like Hammersonic have in abundance. “When you actually go and see a live performance there, you'll be surprised how passionate they are for metal, just like in other countries,” MOAMETAL points out. “I think that because there isn't much metal culture nearby the Asian people, that’s why each person is so passionate about it.” Maybe folks living in the areas where metal has more cachet—Finland, the United States, the Netherlands—take for granted the cultural substructures they have in place that allow communities to form around mutual love for all things loud. Asia’s metal listeners lack such luxuries, which makes BABYMETAL’s success that much more impressive: They’ve come this far thanks in part to fans who make up for their modest numbers with diehard support.
Just like her bandmates, MOMOMETAL knew little about the “world of metal,” in her words, when she joined BABYMETAL as YUIMETAL’s replacement. But she had the benefit of SU-METAL and MOAMETAL’s years of experience playing heavy metal and engaging with metal communities, and through that, she’s come to appreciate the allure of the culture, not to mention of the music. “I've learned about (metal) from (SU-METAL and MOAMETAL),” MOMOMETAL says, “and through collaborations, I've had more opportunities to meet lots of metal bands and see them perform, so I've started to understand what draws us all to metal music.”
BABYMETAL's cameo in "Heavier Trip" showcases the diversity of the metal scene.
Nikita Sevcov
Laatio and Vidgren use metal’s gravitational pull as Heavier Trip’s central theme, which lends a deeper meaning to BABYMETAL’s participation in the movie. “There are people all around the world that are drawn to heavier music,” Laatio notes. “The diversity of metal music is definitely something we want to emphasize and encourage.” Not every metal aficionado looks like Xytrax. For that matter, they don’t all look like Impaled Rektum’s long-haired and angsty frontman, Turo (Johannes Holopainen), either. They especially don’t all live up to misconceptions of metalheads as antisocial malcontents, which is as fundamental to BABYMETAL’s cameo in the film as their music. “They’re wonderful, kind personalities, and we think it’s important to show that metal music comes from those places and mindsets, too,” says Laatio.
Could that be the key to BABYMETAL’s rise? When Kobayashi first brought SU-METAL, MOAMETAL, and YUIMETAL together, they pioneered a style that in theory shouldn’t have cohered, but which miraculously did, defined by a finesse as upbeat as it is brutal. Given the limited space heavy metal occupies in Asia’s pop culture, the “why” might not matter. What matters more is how BABYMETAL’s sound and sensibilities unite people who’d otherwise never be caught dead in the same room as each other. “Nowadays, we often see a unique sight at our live shows,” says SU-METAL, “where girls in cosplay and metal fans are enjoying the show together.”
Published on January 1, 2025
Words by Andy Crump
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.