Sugar, Metal, and the Exact Moment the Internet Broke My Brain

Whatever I’d said about being done with the internet for the day, BABYMETAL made a liar of me.

It’s a Japanese girl group—three teenagers in black tutus fronting a full thrash metal band—and their song ギミチョコ!! operates somewhere beyond good and evil, beyond genre, beyond any framework I had available. The blast beats arrive like a verdict. The girls squeal about chocolate. The breakdown comes in like a freight train through a candy store. You don’t know whether to mosh or buy a stuffed animal.

I put it on full volume and sat there with my mouth open. Then I watched it again. Whatever I had planned for the rest of the evening: gone.