“Wait, What Was That?”
I caught their show in Shinjuku once, completely unprepared, and honestly I stood there for the first two minutes with my jaw just hanging open. Not in a polite, appreciative way. In a what is happening to me way. EEVEE — stylized in Japanese as ミミレミミ, out of Fukuoka — do not sound like anything else operating in Japan’s metal underground right now. They barely sound like anything operating on the planet.
Here’s the problem with trying to describe them: every word you reach for feels like it undersells the chaos. You say “death metal” and people picture something they already know. You say “jazz-influenced” and people imagine some tasteful Cynic-lite noodling over clean chords. EEVEE are neither of those things, and they are somehow both of them at once, cranked to a level of aggression that makes the seams between genres disappear entirely.
The riffs are genuinely complex — not technically-impressive-for-the-sake-of-it, but structurally strange, the kind that snag on your ear wrong and make you question whether the time signature just shifted under your feet without warning. And then the blast beats hit. Hard. Relentless. The kind of percussion that doesn’t frame the music so much as assault it alongside the guitars. Then a moment opens up — something almost cool, almost lateral, a harmonic idea that absolutely should not be living inside a song this violent — and you realize there’s a jazz sensibility buried in there, not decorating the surface but operating in the bones of the compositions.
Brutality With a Brain
To be real, the vocals are what pushed me over the edge that night in Shinjuku. Stacked, piling, one phrase hammering into the next with zero room to breathe. There’s a relentlessness to the delivery that goes past death metal convention and into something genuinely unhinged, but controlled — which is the disturbing part. This doesn’t feel accidental. Every choice sounds intentional and considered, even when what you’re hearing sounds like total sonic collapse.
Fukuoka has a reputation. It’s not Tokyo, it’s not Osaka — it has its own identity in Japan’s underground, and bands from there tend to carry a particular kind of regional seriousness. EEVEE fit that energy. They’re not playing for trend cycles or algorithm bumps. The music is too difficult, too weird, too uncommercial for any of that. This is a band doing exactly what they want to do, and what they want to do happens to be completely extreme.
The jazz angle is worth sitting with, because it’s not a gimmick. Kind of like how the best avant-garde metal bands use dissonance not to signal sophistication but to find new ways to make you feel genuinely unsettled — that’s what EEVEE are doing with these open, searching harmonic passages. They don’t resolve where you expect. They don’t behave. And then the blast beats come back and bury everything.
Honestly, “嘘でしょ！” — “no way, that can’t be real” — is the correct first response. Mine too. Go find them.
