Replacing a founding member of BABYMETAL was never going to happen overnight, and it didn’t. The person who became MOMOMETAL spent four years doing the job before she was given the title.
The Same School
Momoko Okazaki was born on 3 March 2003. In May 2015 she joined Sakura Gakuin, the idol group whose heavy music club had produced BABYMETAL five years earlier. SU-METAL and MOAMETAL both came through it. She graduated on 24 March 2018.
So when BABYMETAL later needed someone who could learn its choreography and understand where it came from, she had been trained in the same place as the people already on stage.
The Avenger Years
YUIMETAL left BABYMETAL in October 2018. From 2019, the third position in the group’s three-person choreography was filled by three support dancers taking turns. Okazaki was one of them. She appeared in the videos for “DA DA DANCE” and “Light and Darkness,” toured, and went home without a stage name of her own.
In 2021 she also competed on the South Korean audition programme Girls Planet 999. It is a detour that makes sense in hindsight: a dancer in her late teens, without a permanent place, trying a second door.
1 April 2023
On 1 April 2023, at Pia Arena MM in Kanagawa, BABYMETAL announced her as its third member. The name was MOMOMETAL.
Her first recorded vocals with the group came on the single “METALI!!,” released on 18 August 2023. Metal Forth, on 8 August 2025, was her first album as a member. It entered the Billboard 200 at number nine. By then she had also stood on the stage of the O2 Arena in London, on 30 May 2025, when BABYMETAL became the first Japanese act to headline it.
Why It Matters
Fans of long-running groups are rarely kind to a new member. BABYMETAL’s answer was patience. By the time the announcement came, the audience had watched her do the work for four years.
Start with “METALI!!,” then Metal Forth.
