Perfume keeps finding new opportunities more than 15 years into its career. This spring, the electro-pop trio embarks on its latest international tour, with stops in Asia and North America, but the real development comes at the very end of that jaunt when the group plays the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, over two weekends in April.
"It's going to be a bigger challenge for us," Ayaka Nishiwaki, better known as "A-chan," tells The Japan Times from the Shibuya office of the group's talent agency Amuse Inc. "The time of our set will probably be difficult. And of course, playing for a crowd that mostly doesn't know us."
Their appearance at the most buzzed-about music festival around is a first for a J-pop group (depending on how you classify a band like X Japan), and puts Perfume in the role of underdog. But that's a position the three — A-chan, Yuka "Kashiyuka" Kashino and Ayano "Nocchi" Omoto — have played plenty in their career, going from local gigs in their hometown of Hiroshima where they covered U.K. pop to a Tokyo-based project on the verge of disbandment in the mid-2000s. But they rallied to become one of J-pop's biggest acts so far this century, and the rare one to develop a strong following outside Japan. And as 2019 gets underway, the trio keeps looking for new avenues — musical and otherwise — to explore.