MAMESHiBA NO TAiGUN and TONAi BOUSHO have merged into a new group "MONSTER IDOL"! 1st single "Wonderland" to be released on April 3

actually this was announced a couple of weeks ago but wasn't until today we finally got more information, after the announcement the tentative name was "MAMESHiBA NO TAiGUN, TONAi BOUSHO a.k.a MONSTER IDOL" but seems they are going to go by MONSTER IDOL, the name is a reference to the audition show that created both groups also called MONSTER IDOL and that aired on TBS, MAMESHiBA was the group created after the first season in 2019 and TONAi on 2022

the reason behind the creation of the "new" group was because both groups lost half of their members, MAMESHiBA was down to 2 from 5 original members (although we knew since 2022 that some of them were going to leave the next year) TONAi was down to 1 from 3 original members with the second one leaving just a few weeks ago so it makes sense to merge the groups specially since both were supposed to be rival groups and have been touring together for most of last year

if curious about the previous names MAMESHiBA NO TAiGUN means "small horde of shiba inus" and TONAi BOUSHO means "somewhere in tokyo", in their first performance they played a setlist combining songs from both groups so thankfully their discography is not going to dissapear, while both groups have SNS accounts the group is going to start using the one from MAMESHiBA and also their youtube channel along their Youtube series is going to be taken over by MONSTER IDOL

both groups have pretty good debuts so hopefully their upcoming is just as good

MAMESHiBA NO TAiGUN got unlucky with the covid-19 pandemic, for the months between December 2019 to the second half of 2020 they were among the hottest acts in Japan but unfortunately they couldn't take advange of it since Japan went on lockdown, it wasn't until almost a whole year later (November 2020 or so) that they were able to hold their first concert

ironically because they weren't able to perform or do live events they decided to start a Youtube series called "Bean TV" and became really sucessful Youtubers, during the pandemic every other video they posted doing random variety show games was hitting on average 500k to 1 million views despite not being able to promote the group in public events, at some point i'm sure a lot of people knew them better for the channel than as idols

man talk about bad timing, they are my #1 example of a group that got setback by the pandemic and too bad because they release a lot of good music that year

speaking of their channel i still remember one "prank" during the pandemic where due to having a lot of free time since they couldn't do concerts or live events they decided to prank their manager by digging a 6 feet hole in the ground and then tricking him into falling inside, i just find it really funny and bizarre how some idols spent 3 weeks going to an empty landplot and in the middle of the night digging by hand a hole big enough to fit a person