It took VICTIMOFDECEPTION ten years to release a full album. The reason for the wait is the hardest part of the band’s story.
The Start
The band formed in Tokyo in 2013 and began playing in 2014. It plays deathcore, and it was early. It is often described as one of the bands that pioneered the style in Japan.
The original lineup was Junpei and morby on guitar, Chappy on bass, kumao on drums, and a vocalist named Daichi.
October 2017
Daichi died on 28 October 2017, at the age of twenty-five.
Many bands would have ended there, and nobody would have questioned it. The four instrumentalists decided to continue. They brought in a new vocalist, Makito, and went back to work.
That lineup has held since: Makito, Junpei, morby, Chappy, kumao. Four of the five are the people who started the band.
The Album
In 2024, the tenth year since the band began playing, VICTIMOFDECEPTION finally made its first full-length album. It was paid for through crowdfunding, which means the people who had followed the band through all of it put up the money.
The album is called MIGHTY RULERS. On release it reached number one on Apple Music’s chart of metal albums in Japan.
One of its songs, “Unsaint,” has a guest: Kagami of DEXCORE.
Why It Matters
Deathcore is music about extremes, and it can seem like a pose. This band’s history is not a pose. It lost a founding member at twenty-five, kept the name, kept the other four together, and let its audience fund the record it had owed them for a decade.
The chart position is a nice detail. The fact that the album exists is the point.
Start with “Unsaint,” then the rest of MIGHTY RULERS.
