Right at the just-passed May's tail end, we've got one more series-debut thanks to Pop Tap Beat's erratic song distribution antics! Let's have a listen of it for ourselves.
| Game | Genre |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PTB |  |
★1 97 |
★3 193 |
★5 300 |
★8 497 |
- |
122
winksb (Wink - Sabishii Nettagyo)May 2025's overall-debut Pops tune chimes back to the dawn of the Heisei era, with a song starting out in mid-April 1989 as the CM theme for Panasonic S-TYPE Headphone Stereo that would eventually become the first popularity cornerstone to the showa idol duo performeng it: Wink (ウィンク), which was founded the year earlier. Associated to the PolyStar label, the performers/singers chosen for its formation -Sachiko Suzuki (鈴木早智子) and Shoko Aida (相田翔子)- were selected among 1987's winners of the reoccurring "Miss Up" beauty contests held by Wani Books' UP TO BOY magazine in 1987, with suzuki winning the "7th Grand Prix" edition and Aida winning the 9th one. Starting from the song Sabishii Nettaigyo (lit. 'Lonely Tropical Fish') onward, the Wink girls started to integrate in their choreographies the one key trait the act would most be remembered for, by suggestion of their first-time-producer guitarist Haruo Mizuhashi: to perform their songs in the most emotion-less way possible while wearing the most flashy clothing typical of the lolita image of the late 80ies. Due to the act's declining popularity, Wink's girls eventually began to pursue their own solo career while the band was marked as "on indefinite hiatus", despite the unfortunate death of their producer Mizuhashi by heart failure in 2018 marking a de-facto outlier for the act not becoming active like before for good.
The 5th single of Wink, Sabishii Nettaigyo was such a monumental success for the time to start a streak of No.1 Oricon chart peaks to last for quite a while, while also getting a bunch of accolades that were rarely handed out to a female group in the past, getting Best Song awards from Yoimuri TV's 22nd All Japan Cable Broadcasting Awards and at the 31st Japan Record Awards, the first one for TBS TV's award series since the Heisei era's beginning. Despite their label abruptly putting the idol duo on "hiatus" after eight years of performance, Suzuki and Aida both continued to perform together for their fans in key anniversary milestones of their career as Wink idols, most prominently holding informal fan concerts once every 10th anniversary year of the act's founding (except 1999) and performing their RIAJ-platinum-certified-selling hit Sabishii Nettaigyo once every 10 years from 1998 on live TV broadcasting, with the latest of such venues being followed by the Wink discography being distributed online, followed by a limited-edition Sabishii Nettaigyo single release on April 27th, 2018.
Despite the low BPM pace, it's a rather busy chart based on backbeat clusters on Oni mode, one where Kat notes lead the way.
