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Is going to a concert the night before catching a morning flight to Ontario a good idea? Not really. But Atarashii Gakko!’s first time in Vancouver was something worth losing sleep over.
It’s rare for a J-pop band to make a global splash the way that Atarashii Gakko! has. The band affectionately known as AG! really entered western mainstream last December, when it performed the punky “Tokyo Calling” on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Since then, the quartet has played Coachella, headlined Tokyo’s storied Nippon Budokan arena, released a song for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, and racked up some eye-watering social media numbers to boot.
The success has been a long time in the works, coming several years after dropping the hip-hop-tinged “Nainainai”, the band’s first worldwide release, in early 2021. But “Nainainai” was hardly the work of musical newcomers, either: AG! …