Dis Cover: Perfume – Nebula Romance

Perfume – Nebula Romance – Part 1 [Regular Edition] | Polydor Records / Perfume Records

Perfume – Nebula Romance – Part 1 [Limited Edition] | Polydor Records / Perfume Records

There really isn’t much to say about the Limited Edition cover. It’s fine. But I do think having Perfume on it would have been better. An image which has the same art style as the Regular Edition, but without the other characters. And we’ll get into the characters, because I have…thoughts and questions.

The Regular Edition cover sure is something, huh? That shit is like the OG Star Wars: A New Hope posters, Super Sentai and Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555, all slapped together. I do like it. Although I couldn’t help but wonder if it was AI generated. Largely because everything on the cover aside from Perfume seems…random.

It it a bit bizarre seeing people other than Perfume on an album cover. The same way that the music video for “Time Warp” took me aback a little, because it was the first time seeing Perfume interact with other people in a music video since “Fushizen na Girl”

I think the cover could have equally have been as cool if the only people featured on it were Perfume. Perhaps it should have been. Unless the tour and music videos will feature the other characters. Otherwise, they truly are just random. I think using characters from Perfume’s previous music videos would have been a cool direction to go. The camera operators from “Secret Secret”. The briefcase guy from the “Laser Beam” video. The girls from the “Fushizen na Girl” video. The guys from the “Time Warp” video.

Or they could have used people from Perfume’s real life inner circle. There is a part of me that wonders if the person in the back should have been Yasutaka Nakata, but perhaps that’s too on the nose. Then again, there are two band members on the cover who resemble Daft Punk—which was a very interesting choice. It’s not even subtle. People will look at them and say ‘Is that Daft Punk?’. Not only do the masks look similar, but one of them even has a clear guitar, just as Daft Punk had in the music videos for “Get Lucky” and “Lose Yourself to Dance”.

Perfume and Daft Punk are kinda in the same space creatively. “Fushizen na Girl” reminded me a lot of a Michel Gondry music video—a director I was introduced to via Daft Punk’s “Around the World”. And something about the sound and production style of “Dream Fighter” has always reminded me of Daft Punk. The only thing that makes the inclusion of these Daft Punk characters weird is that it’s not Daft Punk, but looks so much like Daft Punk. Why not make them Elevenplay in Perfume’s Cosmic Explorer Tour outfits? I wonder perhaps if it would have been a better choice to have had Hajime Sorayama create two female characters as band members and included them instead. Rather than having two characters who are supposed to be non-descript, but look so much like Daft Punk, that people will think they’re Daft Punk, but aren’t Daft Punk.

My biggest issue generally with these others characters is that there is no real point of reference for any of them. They’re just there, because aesthetic and theme. Which I think is unfortunate and also a bit lazy, given that I’d given examples of who these characters coulda have been / been portrayed by, which would have made more sense and tapped into this world that Perfume and their team have been building for all of these years.

Perfume – Nebula Romance – Part 1 [Fan Club Edition] | Polydor Records / Perfume Records

The variety show style cover is interesting. Initially I wasn’t sold on it, because I felt that it lacked the impact of concept of the Regular Edition. But then my mind cast back to Plasma and LEVEL3, and how those album covers shared visuals with a music video. And I think that’s what we’re getting with the Limited Edition cover here. The Regular Edition is the big concept cover. And the Limited Edition cover is the usual music video look cover. So I guess we can expect a music video for “Ima Ima Ima” to feature Perfume in these dresses, performing the song on stage at the ‘The Mr. Mic Show’—which is also referenced in their Tokyonode exhibit Disco-Graphy. And the more I think about it, the more I like it and the more I feel it has a good concept. I guess it’s just that the Regular Edition cover has more of a wow factor and catches you attention, because it features a bunch of different references stylistically and is so different for a Perfume album.

One thing’s for sure. If Perfume’s team are on their shit, the marketing for this album could be very cool.

I would lean all the way into the variety show concept, and have every single performance Perfume do for the run of this album be in the style of an 80s variety show. 80s style dresses. 80s style sets. And when it comes to performing the old shit, I’d only have them perform their distinctly 80s cuts. So basically, anything from Triangle. And I would most DEFINITELY have them perform “Secret Secret” and reference that music video—either with the staging or with Nebula Romance – Part 1 takes on the outfits.

I would also shoot two commercials for the album. One which is like a variety show commercial which airs on TV. And one which is like a film trailer which plays in front of films in cinemas. And I’d have the out-of-home marketing (posters, billboards, etc) mimic this too—posters which look like movie posters and some look like ads for an upcoming variety show.

The concept of these covers leave so much room for Perfume’s creative team to deliver something special for a tour. So I hope they deliver on it. Perfume’s album tours tend not to really have concepts. And often the branding for the tour is different to that of the album. So there’s a real chance here to not only create on overarching concept and narrative for a tour, but for the tour and the album to feel like they share the same themes.

Perfume have also released the tracklisting. And interestingly, there is no intro. You’d think an album like this would have an intro of some sort. But, nope. It just kicks off with “The Light”. I hope Nakata re-worked that song to give it a better intro and a tighter structure to make it feel more fitting for an album opener, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Time is flying by so fast, that I didn’t even realise until this morning that Nebula Romance – Part 1 releases digitally on 20 September, which is next week. The whole time I was thinking this album drops in November.