Perfume drop a teaser for Nebula Romance: Part 2, which sees them confronting Emperor Palpataka

Perfume has released a teaser for Nebula Romance: Part 2. And we have all learned our lesson from the last time, so we can better manage our expectations. We know this ain’t a film. We know we ain’t getting a series of music videos. This is just a preview for the music video of the hero song for Nebula Romance: Part 2 — which is gonna be either “Cipher”, “Reboot World”, “Virtual Fantasy”, “Teenage Dreams” or “Exit”.

I thought that the colour of the Army of the Light uniforms for Nebula Romance: Part 2 would be blue. But, nope. They are red. The same colour and shade as Kikimo’s uniform — the cyborg woman.

I’m still holding firm that the villain here is a mangled version of Yasutaka Nakata. That fried wisp of hair from his bangs? Baby. Who else could it be other than Emperor Palpataka?!

The song in the teaser sounds a lot like “Plasma”, which is one of my favourite Perfume album intros and one of my favourite songs on Plasma. It would have been far more fitting as an album intro to Nebula Romance. In fact, some of the songs on Plasma would have been a better fit for Nebula Romance had they just not put that album out. But that’s a whole other post and something I get into in my review of Nebula Romance: Part 1.

Perfume - Nebula Romance: Part 2 | Polydor / Universal Music

The production quality of this video looks really cool, just as it did for “Cosmic Treat”. And it’s nice that we’re getting another Perfume music video which deviates from the boring, templated Perfume videos we had gotten after LEVEL3 — where it felt like the creative spark for Perfume’s music videos dimmed pretty significantly. But I really do wish that both parts of Nebula Romance had gotten more of a standard rollout, where we got proper single releases with music videos, because they would have benefitted from it greatly.

The whole thing with Nebula Romance was that it was two albums which told this space opera type story — but there’s been no real world building that’s been done with any of it to help engross fans in the world of it. The story of Nebula Romance has been shoved in an album inlay, confined to the tour and given a poster which acts as the album cover. But so little of this story is in the songs. And we only got one music video for each part of Nebula Romance, which condensed a story which should have been split out into more music videos. I have not felt immersed in the world of Nebula Romance because of this weird approach that Perfume’s team have taken with not really building it out beyond the tour. The world is raggedy right now, so I think the fandom would have liked a world to escape to.

If there were albums which actually needed a more traditional rollout, it was Nebula Romance: Parts 1 and 2. And this could have been spiced up with different things and approaches to help it feel different. But this whole thing of ‘throw the digital singles out with all of these tie-ins which don’t feel connected to the story of Nebula Romance and then give them one music video the week before the physical release of the album’ deal just isn’t working for me. Perfume’s team are creative as fuck and Perfume have the money and the resources to do so much more with their rollouts than they’ve done so far.

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💿 Album reviews: Game | Complete Best | Triangle | LEVEL3 | JPN | Cosmic Explorer | The Best “P Cubed” | Future Pop | Plasma | Nebula Romance: Part 1

🎛️ Extended Mixes: Mawaru Kagami | Moon | Cosmic Treat | Nebula Romance