Perfume’s Nebula Romance tours finally get a physical home release date

Perfume’s Nebula Romance tours finally get a physical home release date

Fans had been asking and wondering about the Nebula Romance: Episode 1 physical home release for a while. But as time went on, it seemed almost certain that the supporting tours for parts 1 and 2 of Nebula Romance would release together, and that’s exactly what is happening.

The home release of the Nebula Romance tours will be a multi-disc set — with the Blu-ray edition featuring 3 discs and the DVD edition featuring 4 discs. Unfortunately, the covers are pretty…meh. The main slip case features the Death Star speaker known as ‘The Moon’ which featured on the Nebula Romance: Part 1 album cover and was also a part of the staging for the Nebula Romance: Episode 1 tour. And the individual cases for both tours are just the album covers.

Perfume’s Nebula Romance tours finally get a physical home release date
Perfume ZO/Z5th Anniversary - Nebula Romance | Polydor Records / Universal Music

It’s a shame that we didn’t get a brand new piece of artwork and variations of the album covers. All of Perfume’s previous album tours featured differing artworks to the albums they were for. But so much concerning Nebula Romance has been bucking Perfume trends (some for the worst, some for the better) that it’s not surprising that the covers for the home release of the tours also buck a trend.

A question that fans had about the physical home release of Nebula Romance: Episode 1 was how it would handle the Side B section of the tour — which had a setlist consisting of non-Nebula Romance: Part 1 songs which changed each show. Would the show for the home release be of one particular show? Or would the setlist be pieced together from multiple shows, with the songs decided by an official fan poll? But the Side B section for the home release will be from one particular show, as was the case when the tour first streamed on U-Next. I think this is fine, given that the Side B section of Nebula Romance: Episode 1 featured songs that fans have seen Perfume perform numerous times over the years. So I doubt fans would be too precious that the home release version of the tour doesn’t feature a certain songs. And I think the show they went with for the home release had a good Side B — made up of fan favourites and songs which made decent use of the stage. “Natural ni Koishite” in particular was really cool. I think the Episode 1 performance of “Natural ni Koishite” might be one of the best live performances Perfume has done of the song, because of the set allowing them to recreate moments from the music video.

One of these days I’ll review both tours / shows. I really liked one of them. But wasn’t so keen on the other. And as always, I look forward to Perfume stans telling me in the comments that I should kill myself, because I didn’t like one of the outfits and wish we got performances of deeper cuts.

Nebula Romance releases on Blu-ray and DVD in Japan on 27th May. And I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if there was a theatrical release of these tours somewhere down the line. It’d be a cool thing to do on the anniversaries of the albums and for them to feature additional angles and previously unseen behind-the-scenes footage of the tours.


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