Hangry & Angry is a classic example of the J-pop industry at its best -- a completely manufactured product that is still too endearing not to like (the famed "kawaii" effect). The band was established in 2008, and the driving force behind the project was the designer H.Naoto, who wanted to promote his new clothing line. The artist Gashicon created the characters Hangry and Angry, done in the "gurokawa" (grotesque-cute) style and imbued with a silly legend of being time and space travelers from "H44 Star Nebula" who come to Earth in a "Love Machine" to save the planet from global warming. The characters got real-life incarnations in the form of ex-members of Morning Musume, a juggernaut girl pop vehicle -- Hitomi Yoshizawa (Hangry) and Rika Ishikawa (Angry) belonged to its fourth generation of performers. The music, which combined pop-punk with techno pop and was credited to producer Izam of the visual kei/pop stars Shazna, seemed to be just a single ingredient in this elaborate kitsch-art scheme that also included a Harajuku Hangry & Angry shop carrying stuffed dolls made after the characters, but it worked: their Japanese MySpace page got 100,000 hits in four days after its launch in late 2008, and the debut indie EP, Kill Me Kiss Me, came out in Japan, the U.S., Korea, and Taiwan. The band soon debuted live as well, and wasted no time expanding overseas -- they played Sakura-Con in Seattle. Their first full-length, Sadistic Dance, arrived in 2009, its Japanese version following a wide European release. ~ Alexey Eremenko