Ha, ditto right back, awesome to see a familiar face too, hope you're well!
Yeah, it's been a real pleasure and DAMN, You were...! Jaw-dropping every time.
The feeling you describe I can identify with strongly. I had my selection of albums that I knew through and through that I just loved to teeny tiny bits and I didn't really venture outside of them. I had long formed my opinion of the albums that had came out after what was the golden era for me and I didn't ever expect them to budge much, I'll admit. Quite fortunately, I was wrong!
I've been exploring slowly the albums I missed out on (deliberately or just because I didn't follow actively) and it's been a bit of a journey. (miss)understood I had dismissed for being boring and bland, but it was actually (after the singular success of You were...) the album that got me back into the swing of things and is now among my absolute favourites. I then went back to a bunch of others and found myself surprised: NEXT LEVEL is great (and already has some of my all-time favourite tracks), Rock n Roll Circus is soooo much better than I ever gave it credit for (but these I had already mentioned). GUILTY has been getting regular spins lately - I didn't and don't care for its theme and photo shoot (I say this with all the love I have for Ayu: it's devoid of character, and to me it was really the first album to suffer from this
) but musically it is actually solid old-school Ayu. LOVE again is suuuuper solid. Love songs I already found decent enough in the past but has been growing on me. M(A)DE IN JAPAN is really, really, like really good.
Party Queen, incidentally, I've just been getting into. Thematically and photo-shoot-wise it is probably my least favourite album. I don't like the vibe it projects, just seems a bit trashy, and Ayu is just too good for trashy, haha. The album starts off in that fashion too, imo (first two tracks really don't do it for me) but actually picks up surprisingly well afterwards with some really great tracks (Eyes, Smoke, Magic is a bit unnecessary though). I'm definitely putting it on regular rotation!