She looks beautiful!

Ugh she's so close yet so far away :( I wish I had a chance and money to meet her

You're all a bunch of moldy, smelly, wet blankets.
Ayu should experiment after delivering the snooze fest called A ONE.

Give me Next Level and COLOURS' love child, please!

i hope she tweets couple of days before if she's gonna meet fans so i have time to ask some days off from work and book a flight to London :yes

The best album since GUILTY.

absolutely agree!

isn't it too early for recording new album?

Chances are she's got everything ready...You know how fast she works.

I wonder if this will be another lengthy stay or if she's ready written the majority and truly just there for recording?

Let me guess, you love Party Queen as well? :P
Points for praising GUILTY, though! That album is so magnificent in its rawness and despair.

I mean, we got WARNING and several songs did show the "back to form" spirit she was talking about in regards to the album, but it personally was such a chore after a while and the songs seemed to sound very samey, or similar to other songs she's released. Idk, I like it but I'm critical of it.

What really bothers me about AHS is that the moment something new is done, people bitch and moan about Ayu being fake or following trends and missing the old Ayu. I get it to an extent, but it's annoying because it means that she can't win if she stays the same or if she changes.

^ well, that is how the sekai works. The music is your subjective damned cup of tea or not. Naturally, nobody has any control over how the next album will sound or how the cover will look like, so no need to throw any shade or calling us a wet blanket (lol) and leave people be in their own little dream world.
In my opinion, no one was moaning until you 'jumped in the scene'.
O, &, I never heard anyone saying that Ayu is fake. And if anyone did, I guess they left the forum a while ago.

Yes. I think of Party Queen as a continuation of (miss)understood. It's probably among her most diverse albums.

To be honest, over all NEXT LEVEL has to be her weakest album to date, even though the singles were great.

^ Hm... I can see how PQ could be a thematic follow up to (miss) understood. Musically, I cant. What PQ seems to do with its experimental tracks is be alot bolder, but I don't think the variety is there. I'd place Rock N' Roll Circus as the real (m)u follow up and have PQ come after that album.

And it's interesting that you'd say that about NEXT LEVEL because I think that the album tracks are better than the single tracks xD Well, Rule/Sparkle was very solid but the Days/Green single throws the rest of the album off whole being Ayu's standard fare at the time.

Maybe I just have really different/unpopular opinions, lol.

@xLuna&1LOVE there was moaning about Ayu working with these two house producers ir whatever, you can see it -in this thread or in the general chat (unsure of where it is ).

Agree...although I love A ONE. Just nothing like Party queen please!!

Definitely this please. A ONE was a good return to form but it's time to bring back "experimental" Ayu again. I *need* a sequel to COLOURS. She tried it out then and it was a fun album besides a couple snoozers and I just feel like she can perfect the sound even more if she gives it another shot.

Yeah to me Party Queen was well thought and had a good flow !! She makes a lot of experimentation especially with the electro and jazzy segment ! What really bother me in this album is her voice it's like she was sick the day of the recording ... This album with the voice she has now I would have almost nothing to say about it !
Let's be honest a lot of people have a biased opinion because of the trashy covers !! Her fandom decreased so suddenly after that !She should have keep the original concept !

Wow, people have such DIFFERENT opinions about Ayu's music. What one considers to be a masterpiece or a great album, other sees it as boring, uninspiring, not exciting etc.
Actually, this is quite the magic of music and Ayu's. And the good news is that every song (and I mean every one) is loved by someone.

Colours is so basic. I guess you can call that experimental in the sense of ayu never doing it...but it's not worth making a part 2 of imo. You can make music in that genre and have it be much more innovative. But Colours wasn't. Very fun album and I enjoyed it, but it was certainly lacking depth in many ways. I don't mind shallow lyrics sometimes and see their worth but when the music is also like that, it just makes the overall experience lackluster.

I suppose I see how many fans inherently find music from Colours more "exciting" and so more interesting to listen to, but I don't think that something with an EDM label is automatically more interesting or better than the styles of music that are on A One. You can make very fascinating and innovative songs in the style of that album as well. A One was just also lacking in many ways while using that style in the same way Colours was lacking in its own. So switching back to Colours-esque music won't fix any of that.

I don't care what genre she decided to sing in as long as she does at least something somewhat innovative and with depth. I think that's what she needs right now.

@mizuki-7 Party Queen wouldn't be as interesting fron an artistic point of view if it wasn'y for it's trashy overall image IMO xD

@Primavera Yeap... Both Colours and A One are well produced and good pop albums, but both are also overly safe... I can get why she did it and I can see her plan worked nicely, but I miss bolder material

+100000 ponts for you.

It had no flow, though lol. The first three songs are upbeat and then we go to some basic pop rock, then after some showtunes/jazz (I liked the jazz, it was fun) it ends in a ballad. Her voice is really poor in this album, and I'd probably like it alot more if her current voice was on the tracks.

The problem that I have with the concept is that it felt a bit lacking in execution. The tabloid concept would have been cool, but then it's only used on the cover. We're meant to attach the meaning of the title song to the photos but it feels hollow. Don't even get me started on the twitter mess with "drunk" Timmy over the "totally obvious" meaning... that still feels messy as fuck.
On my end, I think that people who like this album know the concept after it was fed to them and THEN can see the story. Lyrically the album is very solid, but asthetically it fell so short. I don't "see" a theme, but a random photoshoot and ugly leopard print :P