Hanabie’s Download set from 2023 is a legendary set considering how short it was. The band have slowly garnered a cult following in the UK with their blending of super kawaii aesthetics and razor-sharp, bombastic metalcore riffing. Their Manchester show had been sold out for months, and as the hour grew closer, Manchester’s weeb community took their places and got ready for a night of heavy metal with Hanabie and Lake Malice.
Anyone who has been to an even remotely queer-coded show lately will likely have come across Lake Malice by now. The band are workhorses that tour as often as they possibly can, if you were at Scene Queen just a few months ago, then you’ve seen this set. ‘Stop the Party’, ‘Bloodbath’, and ‘Nobody Wants You’ were returning staples, and it’s all fantastic and high energy, but the real standout of the set was the brand new track from their upcoming album.
We’ll be waiting with bated breath for this new record as vocalist Alice Guala says, “we might come back soon, who knows?” We know they’ll be back in no time with a shiny new record that will surely split skulls and rile up a perpetually frustrated and aggressive crowd.
After a bit of an intermission, Hanabie took to the stage accompanied by pounding electronic music before starting the wild and unruly session of adorable violence with ‘Warning’. The show continued with genuinely insane and vicious tracks like ‘Spicy Queen’ and ‘Metamorphose’, which started up a mosh pit that continued throughout the entire show. Even the more cutesy, radio-friendly tracks like ‘Girls Talk’ and ‘Bucchigiri Tokyo’ inspired pure insanity.
Hanabie blended dance music with metalcore, and that made for some of the more interesting moments of the show. ‘Kotoshi Koso Gal’ was such a sickly sweet bit of bubblegum that got the crowd jumping in ways that made the floor move, something I’ve never felt at Academy 2 before.
While the entire show was a visual feast full of adorable gimmicks, choreography, and on-stage banter, it was hard to distinguish songs without looking at a setlist or understanding Japanese. This isn’t a problem per se, but it did make finding specific songs difficult in the long run after the show was over. The girls took the time to talk about the things they enjoyed about Manchester, which included Satan’s Hollow, Archies, and Buckfast, certainly unconventional choices, but the effort to engage with each other’s cultures was highly appreciated. We even got to see Yukina down a glass of Buckfast before ‘Girls Talk’, which is one of the most Manc things you can do. It’s also worth mentioning that we got to experience Yukina reciting the classic, iconic Jet2Holiday meme in full, which was an interesting experience to say the least.
The latter portions of the show contained songs that were heavier than some pure deathcore bands. ‘Neet Game’ featured some disgusting riffing and preposterous vocal gymnastics, and this whole stretch of crushing riffing just kept coming. ‘Tousou’ got the whole crowd jumping, and ‘Love Ranbu’ built up the hype to critical mass with its buildups and colossal drops. It’s a track that’s too serious and heavy to be a power metal track but too unconventional to be a typical metalcore rager, it just exists as its own unique thing.
The show ended with ‘Ghost Mania’ and ‘Sentimental Heroine’, two bonafide ragers that sapped all the energy the crowd had left with their punishing riffing and Slayer-style breakdowns. It’s amazing to see a band like this venture so far from their home to put on such a wide UK tour, and hopefully this inspires other Japanese bands to tour here, the demand is certainly there. A passionate crowd will always be waiting for them in Manchester, but if this ends up being the only time Hanabie plays in Manchester, then it was certainly a night to be remembered and will be talked about by the massive otaku denizens of Manchester.
