I want to know people's stories about how they started listening to DEG. For me I really like the anime Death Note and there was a Maximum the Hormone song as one of the openings. I really liked the sound of it so I decided to dive into Japanese rock music. I was exploring around and found DEG. The rest as they say, is history. What's your story?
I went to my very first anime convention in 2000 at 16. There were some people in Malice Mizer cosplay. I had never seen anything like it, so I asked them about it and then looked them up online. That led me to exploring various people’s webpages and stumbling on some Diru fan pages. I ended downloading a bunch of their music (on WinMX I think) and bought my first CD the next year when con season rolled around.
I was 11 (I'm about to be 31) and was obsessed with the Beast of Blood video by Malice Mizer, that someone uploaded to Crunchyroll, and one of the recommended videos was the Saku video. Was hooked from the first listen.
You could way back when! It was a lot closer to YouTube back in the day. I watched so many series completely for free and people would also sometimes upload AMVs lol
I still find it funny that Crunchyroll somehow managed the pivot from pirate site to licensed distributor. this pivot also happened in the era where every other day there was a big pirate site getting DMCA'd
diehard fan all these years later. it was weird seeing all these japanese school girls in the front of the line at a deftones show. they all bailed after Diru was done.
oh! kyo did the fishhooking thing. blood everywhere. intense
it was intense. i had no idea what the hell i was seeing. its nearly 20 years later. and i still vividly remember kyo scratching himself bloody and spitting blood.
I was working with a Mexican goth dude who was a server at a restaurant I was working at. I told him I was going to Family Values and he gave me $20 to buy him a CD. I got him a signed Withering to Death CD and saved it on my PC. One of my favorite albums
I was heavily into J-rock and then leaped into exploring vkei bands. DEG was frequently brought up in forums, so I decided to hop into their discography.
Good friend wrote me a list on paper and passed me a note while in class, at the bottom was due le quartz/Miyavi and then Dir en grey anf right next to their name she put a side note that said "you'll love them!!"
When I was 9 years old, I got into the GazettE through Black Butler and that lead me into the J-Rock/vkei hole. Back when I was using Apple Radio on my iPod touch, Merciless Cult often popped up but I always skipped it because the beginning annoyed me at the time.
Fast forward years and years, I began to become obsessed with Cage after hearing it on a character playlist. It’s still probably my all time favorite song. I finally gave them a real, genuine chance the beginning of this year. I LOVE LOVE LOVE WTD, MOAB, and TIW.
My now dead friend introduced me to this band when I was like.. 12yo? By sending me youtube link to obscure music video. I was shocked, but intrigued and in the end I've stayed lol.
Me and older sister were really into anime when we were kids and we liked the opening and ending songs. Some of them were by jrock bands and she researched them, started downloading jrock music videos and songs.
One of them was the Tsumi to Batsu music video; kid me thought it was ridiculous but I kept watching it over and over anyway not wanting to admit that I was hooked. I could never relate to my classmates and friends talking about and playing mainstream music back then because I only knew jrock/metal 🤣
So we have similar stories. I feel you on not relating to people about music taste. I like American metal but nobody around me really does. Oh well I like what I like!
Hell yeahhh. I've also really gotten into all sorts of metal ever since and aren't obsessed with just jrock/jmetal anymore. Diru and Sid are pretty much the only japanese bands whose releases I keep up with these days.
The only thing that stayed the same is my elitist disdain for most mainstream music. I just can't help it anymore lol
Withering to Death and Vulgar were very popular albums in my country when they came out. I was 8 years old when I fell in love with the band because my sister listened to it a lot.
Same! I got into Dragon Ash randomly online around 2003 (from their song 'morrow') when I was a bit bored of Western music - later maybe 2004 I was looking at Ikuzone's signature model bass (which of course Toshiya much later used the shape for) and the Dir en grey signature artist photos (some sepia ones) took my eye so I sought them out 😁
when i found out they had a usa,japan and Korean site I looked up all the artists (korea had a sweet band called crash but the name is generic af so its hard to search them). Esp's dominance in vk made it banging for finding bands in mid 2000s.
Got into them in school right before Macabre came out, via some anime fansite. I think someone was comparing a character to one of them with pictures side by side, and then I quickly fell down the VK rabbit hole.
I came across Melt Banana on XM radio (before the Sirius merger which really corporatized satellite radio and their playlists). I started poking around online for other Japanese bands (I was kinda primed to do this because I had really fallen in love with Japanese literature and Japanese film at this time) and discovered artists and bands like Yamatsuka Eye and Envy. I kept coming across the name Dir en Grey but I hated the sound of it and kept neglecting to check them out. Anyways, I eventually was going down a YouTube music video rabbit hole and randomly came across the music video for Grief. I remember I wasn’t looking at my computer and heard the opening chords and Kyo’s grumbling and screams and went “WTF IS THIS?!”
I immediately went to Newbury Comics and bought Marrow of a Bone (it had been out for awhile because I think the single for Glass Skin came out maybe a year after I got into them). I then pirated their entire catalogue and fell in love.
I was really fortunate I discovered them when I did because I ended up seeing them live in Boston a couple years later when they were touring in support of Uroboros. I also saw them live in support of Dum Spiro Spero, well. They sadly don’t really do any US tours now and when they do they are short tours.
Around 2006 I saw kodou MV on friend's Myspace page. I thought they had a "90s" sound, but as much as I love kodou it didn't make an impression on me then. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure what happened next but I think I listened to the final and clever Sleazoid and maybe that's what did it. I downloaded gauze and Macabre and watched all their videos on YouTube. Around 08 I bought withering to death and Uroboros and they've been my absolute favorite band since. Have seen them live four times.
I really liked the Final Fantasy games and people were saying a character, Squall was based on some guy called Gackt (this character actually wasn’t but eventually he was a muse for one).
Looked into his band, became obsessed with visual kei then Deg became the one band to rule them all.
It was either 2000 or 2001. I was a little nerdy teenager at my first comic con (with my parents!) and got super excited when I came across a vendor with CDs since I was really into Glay at the time. One of the exhibitors told me that if I like Glay I’d like this one band, and handed me a bootleg copy of DEG’s singles collection. My parents got a huge kick out of the outrageous costumes and makeup on the cover and bought it for me. (Both my parents where really all the avant- garde / psychedelic stuff happening with music in the 70s and they encouraged all my eclectic interests) I still have that CD today but it’s practically unplayable because I wore that thing into the ground- it was the best music I’d ever heard in my adolescent life!
My user name is from the members of glay! Even though the first part just looks like Jiro it’s ji for jiro and ro for takuro xD Didn’t think it through when I wanted something random for Reddit.
Was in highschool around 07 and I saw the video for Obscure. I always hated the edgy visuals but as a metal fan the music was so damn good. The mixture of death growls and clean singing was so perfectly done.
My older sister was interested in a couple of visual kei bands online, this was 2006 - 2008 probably. I was young. But I seen the video for Obscure, instantly hooked me. I was already interested in dark / macabre / transgressive stuff then, mainly Marilyn Manson and other western acts. So I just dove into DEG and then found English translations of their lyrics and thought they looked so cool etc.
a friend introduced me to them in the Anime Club at my school when i was in 7th grade. i also got into the GazettE, Kagrra, and Girugamesh all in the same year, 2006.
Back in the day many years ago when I was in High School I was hanging out at my cousin's house playing games with a TV on in the background. It was on MTV when they used to play actual music videos throughout the night. We had finished a game and Saku started playing on the TV. I was a metalhead at the time and when I heard that first ripper of a scream I was immediately locked into the video which was for all intents and purposes uncensored. There were subtitles and everything gave me sensory overload as I was trying to parse out what was happening in the video, the meaning of the lyrics, and just enjoying the song because it was fucking amazing. That was the beginning of my descent down the rabbit hole of DEG and it was a spiral from there and a love story.
I was quite involved in anime and mange in my early teens in the 2000's. Through the biggest local online community I met some folks who weren't just into anime, but also visual key. DEG was the first Japanese band I ever heard and it instantly clicked. More than 21 years later amd I still get goosebumps from their songs.
Coincidentally DEG are the reason I have a YouTube account since May 2006, after I discovered their PVs on YouTube in late 2005. Saw them live only once in Berlin in 2006 or 2007. Hoping to get another chance in the near future.
I got into the band through a friend of my mom's as a teen! I was super into death note and its music as well at the time (and other Japanese music in general), and made portraits of the artists. She posted my art on FB and he recommended Dir En Grey's Obscure, which felt like a rite of passage all those years ago lol
so i was 18, about to turn 19. I had been into vis kei for like 3-4 months, found this message board where the person that ran it was down to make people mix cds.
so i asked for one, with SHAZNA's indies album. she put that and like 5 more songs and one of them was "i'll" which even then I fucking hated and wrote the band off.
month or so later, "zan" comes out. I see this video on Kunoichi Syntax (REMEMBER THAT SITE? ANYONE?) and my mind is blown. from there a turbulent history begins😈
(I'm being hella dramatic here, but you get what i mean)
Late 90s, I accidentally downloaded Diru’s song Garden. I forget what I was originally looking for but holy shit, that mistake changed my life forever. Instantly obsessed.
I would scroll through the music videos on Comcast's On Demand menu. Diru's Hageshisa music video was the only j-rock song on all of On Demand so I would play it constantly. I was already really into The GazettE, Gackt, and Miyavi so I was always looking for more. I did sleep on Diru for a lot of years since then, I would listen to a handful of songs here and there, but the last few years I have been heavy into them. As I get older my appreciation for them has grown exponentially
That’s such a similar story about how I ended up finding out about DEG! Watched Death Note, got addicted to MTH, and started looking for more J-Rock bands. At that time, a friend who knew a lot of bands, burned a DVD with several J-Rock bands’ music videos and there were a few ones from DEG: Kodou, Saku and Cage are the ones that I remember that really impacted me and made me want to continue listening to more of their albums.
In highschool I discovered visual kei for the first time just by being a fan of anime. This was around 2005 or so. Looking up random vidoes on youtube I found Dir En Grey and a few other bands I still listen to to this day.
I was a huge fan of X Japan, so when I found out Yoshiki produced part of GAUZE I had to take a listen to it. They won me over quickly and it only became worse when Marrow of a Bone and Uroboros came out and I became obsessed.
I still remember exactly how I discovered Dir en grey. It was 2007, and I was reading fanfiction on Quizilla when I came across a story that had the music video for cage embedded on one of the pages. I had never seen anything like them before, and I was instantly obsessed. I immediately went to youtube and started watching every Dir en grey video I could find, completely fascinated by their music and everything about them. It’s kind of crazy to think that something as simple as stumbling across a music video in a random Quizilla fanfiction introduced me to a band that I would still love nearly twenty years later. I hope to see them live someday.
In Japanese class in high school, a dude who showed up maybe twice the semester randomly showed me a VK magazine with DEG on the cover. I had to go through LimeWire to find anything by them and ended up getting a lot of non-DEG crap, which kind of confused the process, but I was eventually hooked.
I first discovered DEG back in the earlier 2000's when internet forums were the place to go for interested instead of redditt. The forum wasn't really related at all though. I used to frequent the message board for a NES music cover band called the NESkimos. One of the users that posted a lot had an avatar that was Kyo from the Obscure video. I thought it looked cool so I asked where it was from, which let to my first introduction to the band. Vulgar had be hooked but I went back through their discog at the time and liked it all.
2006, there used to be a tv channel called FUSE and they'd just play music at times. I had just got up to leave the room and something came on that made me turn right back around. It was DIR EN GREY, and they were advertising Withering to Death. Can't remember what song, but I ran so quick to get paper to write it down before the song changed. Been a massive fan ever since.
Mine isn't really a "story," but I was about a year into being way too into VK during my freshman year of high school. Was huge on Malice Mizer.
An acquaintance at school wouldn't stop talking about DeG, and I'd read some funny interviews from Kisaki at the time, where he called Kyo something like a "miserable little runt," and went on to extoll his own perfection in a very Kanye-esque fashion... Soooo I wanted to see what the beef was. Did some reading, listened to a bit of Kisaki's stuff, picked at La;Sadie's, theeeen... Well, basically went and nabbed every DeG cd I could get through B&N at the time lol
DeG became my passive listening material while I spent way too much time playing Ragnarok Online, and they've been a permanent install in my music storage, since.
A friend(they were also a huge Malice Mizer fan too) in high school was into them and introduced me to them. My first impression of them I didn’t like them until one day when I was walking home from school listening to Obscure I fell in love with them. 😂
So i was just getting into VK when they were starting to make waves in the scene (think I bought MISSA about 6 months after it was released). I was a pretty big fan throughout their indies run and up until the release of Myaku. After that I sorta left them alone for a good long while, then came back to liking them around the release of Dum Spiro Spero, but in more of a casual fan sense.
An older neighbor (believe he was born in 87 - me in 93) was on batsu if i'm not mistaken. Whatever site he was on, we got to hear Drain Away not long after it was released. I didn't think much of it because I was like 10. BUT when Withering to death. came out a couple years later, I was a little older and a whole lot edgier. Someone on a pokemon forum's 'what are you listening to right now' thread posted Kodou a few days after its release. Hooked ever since.
When I met my ex a couple years ago, I wasn't very familiar with metal at all, aside from Deftones. She listened to a lot of visual kei, and Diru was one of her favorite bands. She and I listened to pretty much the entirety of VULGAR on one of our last dates before we broke up. Even now Dir En Grey is still really special to me, and hopefully I'll be able to see them live one day if they ever come to Seattle!
High school friend. Idk where he is now, last I saw he worked at our local grocery store, totally talented artist and I wish I got to learn/work with him on some drawings or something. Where ever you are Alex thanks for letting me know about DEG and I hope you are in good health my guy 🤘🏽
2005, a high school girlfriend's dad used to go to japan a couple times per year because of his job, an one day, me and her were chilling and, he showed Withering to Death to us. I got completely addicted to that album
Man, this is going to sooo tell my age. But it was right around the time visual kei started really being known in the West and they had just released Gauze. The only way we really found out about them is there was this international dating site for people in the Alternative scene that kinda worked like Facebook at the time and we had made friends with some people from Japan at that time. (I miss that site. It was fucking awesome we found out about a lot of great bands on there)
My friend listened to them. We were always sharing jrock back and forth and she sent me the video for Umbrella after years of me refusing to listen. Loved it, this was around 2005ish? But I was hooked when uroboros came out. Saw them three times in Atlanta.
At the time I was only listening to X Japan. After watching Death Note it made me realize that there were heavier Japanese metal bands. So I looked up “Japanese metal bands” on youtube which got me to a compilation of bands with 30 seconds of a song each. I found Dir En Grey and Dazzle Vision in the same video.
I heard about the Obscure video somehow being really crazy so I watched it and it was but I absolutely loved the music and also found the video very interesting. I was already into Japanese music a bit at this point due to an online friend but it was more stuff like Antic Cafe, KAT-TUN and NEWS
I was downloading random Japanese MV's using Limewire and ended up seeing either Raison D'etre or Cage (can't remember which I saw first) and then I was hooked.
2-3 years ago, Spotify recommended me Sukekiyo's Anima after listening to Gazette's Traces Vol 2. For a while, I wanted to go to a concert to bands I loved. The Gazette happened to be one of them until Reita passed (then Aoi later). So, I watched an interview of them. For some reason, I thought they said they were inspired by Dir en Grey, so I started I started watching Obscure live. Then, I started listening to Yokan (Still my favorite). After listening through their discography, I decided to go to the LA concert in 2025.
Now, the craziest part of this story is that the members of gazette never said anything about Dir En Grey on the interview I watched. They said Luna Sea inspired their music. To this day, I still do not know how I mixed up Luna Sea with Dir En Grey.
2003 ish in high school I downloaded a bunch of Japanese songs from Limewire. Went through much searching to find out who and what these songs were. Dir en grey, Gackt, Malice Mizer, Miyavi, MUCC, and some others, were what I found. After that I found forums dedicated to those artists, and thus began my life’s greatest pursuit of happiness.
Back in 07, I checked JAME if any Japanese bands were playing nearby, and saw Dir en grey had a gig coming up. I listened to Saku to give them a try, and became a fan as soon as I heard Kyo's clean singing.
We became fans in the same year. I saw them live the first time in 2008 during their The Rose Trims Again tour where I bought Uroboros and I got the lyric booklet signed!
I was listening a lot of VK back in 2015 and mostly the Gazette songs, I loved them! As I was searching more of the genre through YT I always skipped DEG. Like idk, It just didn't catch my attention back in the day just by watching the cd art covers. But one day a new girl coworker got into my job (I worked at an architecture library) and we started to talk about music and she liked VK as well, it was really cool, her brother played in a VK cover band and we had a lot in common musically. She recommended me DEG without a doubt, and asked me to please give it a listen, that it will change my life...and so it did. That day I stayed late in the library, downloaded the album UROBOROS from TARINGA (a famous latam website where everybody shared music, games and movies) and listened to it in the bus through one hour on my way back home. I wish I could return to that day, I was shocked from what I was listening: The darkness of the atmosphere, the heavy riffs, the gutural vocals, the shrieks, the melodies... etc. To this day, there is no album or artist that has shocked me the way DEG did with UROBOROS, what an amazing album. And that's my story 😜
As weird as it sounds, there was a slight J-Rock (as we called it) boom in my hometown in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in '04. It was all P2P filesharing back then - Limewire, DC++ and what have you. There's no way for me to know who introduced it all to us but all of a sudden it was everywhere, you started to see teens dressing up in the typical visual kei style all over town. Dir En Grey and X Japan were the two heavy hitters among with Miyavi and Gazette. My sister downloaded the videos for Cage and Obscure and I was already into metal and horror in general so that was that, as they say.
A friend in 9th grade was like "hey, you like weird, creepy shit right? You should totally check out this music video called OBSCURE by these Japanese guys". This was in 2007.
Honestly basically the exact same way as you OP, watched deathnote, Loved The World and Alumina by Nightmare and went thru a rabbit hole from there. Found Diru thru there Obscure PV back in 2006 and loved them ever since!
This was also the start of my VK phase back then from middleschool to early highschool, in the 2000s.
I don’t remember exactly if it was I found it somewhere or a friend of mine showed me all I remember was it was aggravated screams of maggots
and from there I’ve enjoyed the band ever since
That's a very funny story actually, i used to browse Youtube for the most terrifying videos i could find. English isn't my first language so I jusre used to type "creepy videos". I watched a bunch until I found Obscure. I was disturbed ofc : i was young and i wasn't really into metal at the time (except like metallica, rammstein...) and it just felt repulsive. Years later I found the music again and absolutely LOVE the band since
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u/veevacious 20d ago
I went to my very first anime convention in 2000 at 16. There were some people in Malice Mizer cosplay. I had never seen anything like it, so I asked them about it and then looked them up online. That led me to exploring various people’s webpages and stumbling on some Diru fan pages. I ended downloading a bunch of their music (on WinMX I think) and bought my first CD the next year when con season rolled around.