Every ‘DIR EN GREY’ Album Ranked
If you missed the news on May 30th, 2022, Japanese visual kei legends DIR EN GREY finally released their entire discography to streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and the like ahead of the release of their 11th studio album PHALARIS on June 15th, 2022. This is an incredible rarity for Japanese bands, as Japan continues their hesitation towards the streaming market and continues to be the world’s biggest music market for physical goods. And mind you, I mean that this is DIR EN GREY’s entire discography that hit streaming, including their legendary independent debut album GAUZE, an even bigger rarity as GAUZE has only been available to download via alternative means until now.
This is a huge move and something almost never seen, when you look at other bands of similar pedigree within the visual kei sphere like LUNA SEA who offer a very slim range of their excellent discography (of which I ranked last month) on streaming services, excluding their own independent debut album as well as — bafflingly — their magnum opus MOTHER, L’arc~En~Ciel’s own legendary debut DUNE, and the GazettE (who I did the same for very recently) whose admittedly lackluster independent debut album is also absent from streaming services. Worse yet, eternal visual kei pioneers MALICE MIZER (should I rank their discography too?) have an incredible absolute zero minutes of music available on streaming services, leaving their brilliant legacy nearly lost to time in the digital age. Bit of a side note, but seriously though, if you can find a way to listen to their third album Merveilles, fucking do it immediately. All time classic.
So with all this said, where does one start with DIR EN GREY? While you could start from the top with Gauze, the band’s discography has been so diverse in sound over the years that many argue over what specific genre to even call them, with most just settling on either “metal” of some sort or just calling it “visual kei” and leaving it at that. While GAUZE is a more straight up alt-rock album with some hardcore influences, the band’s sound quickly changes to a more avant-garde and metal influence on the following MACABRE and gets even more experimental on KISOU before taking things all the way into heavy metal on VULGAR and Withering to death., trying their hand at nu metal after international success on THE MARROW OF A BONE, progressive maximalism on UROBOROS, going full-on deathcore on DUM SPIRO SPERO, once again taking progressive metal beyond the limit on ARCHE, a more metalcore sound on The Insulated World, and even briefly flirting with black metal influence and synthesizers on their latest PHALARIS.
All of this goes to say that their discography covers a lot of ground. If you’re completely new here though, don’t be afraid of getting into such a dense discography or feel like you’re getting into them too late. So if you don’t want to start from the beginning, it might be best to either pick what sounds the most appealing to you or running through it based on my personal ranking of their albums. DIR EN GREY are still one of the finest bands Japan has ever birthed even to this day. If you’re a veteran fan of the band, just sit back and enjoy my own personal dissection of this incredible band, and if you’re new here, I’m gonna make this nice and easy for you. Get your fishnets and black lipstick on because we’re about to get real goth up in here. I’m also gonna keep it a little shorter than usual, no more than two or three paragraphs since I’ve found myself getting far too wordy on these lists lately and often repeat myself. So…let’s get goth.
1. ARCHE (2014)
I know, right? Has there ever been a ranking on this blog that doesn’t start with a controversial pick? While many OG fans of DIR EN GREY from the mid 2000s might have fallen off by this point in the band’s history — as I’m sure many were disappointed by the allegedly more “generic American stylings” of THE MARROW OF A BONE and simply just outgrew it despite their instance to their mothers that it wasn’t just a phase — have referred to ARCHE as a little bit over-produced and a little too long, and while I can certainly see those as valid points, I’m going to have to disagree entirely.
ARCHE is a massive album, it’s DIR EN GREY at their most maximal. It sees the band reaching new heights in terms of the results of experimenting on previous albums and coming into the studio in peak condition. Kyo’s vocals exceed a full 5 octaves on ARCHE with ease (for those who don’t know, Freddie Mercury could only comfortable sing within 3 octaves), just the most insane falsettos. Mix that a little behind the band with some reverb on songs like ‘Uroko’ or ‘Magayasou’ and you have the most haunting album the band has made to date. The songwriting is also somehow both at its most complex and catchiest, weaving intense progressive metal riffs with bone-chilling hooks and eerie production. My point here being that ARCHE is a maximalist album that simply wouldn’t benefit from production any less sparkly clean than it has.
ARCHE is a band after their “peak” at their real peak, DIR EN GREY’s crowning achievement, the final result of years of experimentation brought together into one incredible and cohesive album. Sure, it might be a bit long, but with songs this good, it goes by pretty fast and will keep you coming back for more to hear those haunting high-pitched vocal melodies, booming drums and bass, and crunchy-clean guitars over and over again. I get overwhelmed thinking about every single song on this album individually and lined up to form the tracklist. Arche might take a few listens through to fully digest, but even on its surface it’s an album that can be appreciated on your first listen alone if you can just sink your teeth in and ignore its runtime. You won’t regret it.
Highlights: ‘Phenomenon’, ‘Tousei’, ‘Magayasou’, ‘Kukoku no Kyouon’
10/10
2. UROBOROS (2008)
UROBOROS is what happens when a band’s fans turn on them because they thought they sold out for a generic sound. On 2007’s THE MARROW OF A BONE, Diru went for a more streamlined American-influenced nu metal sound for the most part, and while I personally still think it’s one killer album (please don’t be mad at me or think I’m contradicting myself about this once you get further down this list), I do agree that the band tried something a little too far out of what people loved them for in the first place. On UROBOROS however the band comes back with the most brutal assault of experimental brutalism they had ever made, not even a year removed from their “nu metal opus”.
Do yourself a favor with UROBOROS too and listen to it twice — the first time with the original 2008 version, and the second time with expanded remaster from 2012; they’re both on streaming services now. The word “remaster” is thrown around too casually too often and usually just means they took the original bounce and brickwalled it, but here they very clearly went in and straight up remixed some of the tracks too, with certain tracks sticking out far more than before. There’s a lot more nuance in the remaster, though my main complaint is that the remaster uses the Japanese version of ‘GLASS SKIN’ which I find inferior to the original English version featured on the 2008 release.
Listen, I speak both languages, my issue here stems from the fact that Kyo’s voice doesn’t come through as emotionally in the Japanese version due to the extra syllables in the lyrics. In English, the lyrics have less syllables and allows for him to more emotively hold out the longer notes in the chorus and ultimately adds more weight to them. If you don’t speak Japanese, it shouldn’t matter much to you anyway as you probably can’t understand most of the English lyrics anyway.
The main opening track VINUSHKA is an intense near 10 minutes of pure and dynamic musical mastery. With its soft acoustic guitar intro leading into powerful chugging riffs, dark melodies, and a massive ending, it sets up the rest of the album with unmatched finesse. DIR EN GREY proved right off the bat here that they’re still the undisputed kings of Japanese metal and it’s note even close.
Highlights: ‘VINUSHKA’, ‘GLASS SKIN’, ‘WARE, YAMI TOTE…’, ‘GAIKA CHINMOKU GA NEMURU KORO’
10/10, another 10/10.
3. Withering to death. (2005)
Alright guys, here we go. This is the one you’re angry at me for not putting at #1. Or is it VULGAR? Well, this is the one that your goth friend in junior high wouldn’t stop listening to. It’s the one that I as a born-again goth adult won’t stop listening to. Withering to death. is quintessential DIR EN GREY, quintessential goth, and quintessential visual kei. A timeless record, brutally heavy for the band at the time, beautifully catchy, and ultimately unforgettable from the get-go, with the opener ‘Merciless Cult’ lulling you in right away with its ear-piercing screams, melodic hook, and dark dynamics from heavy to soft over the course of just under three minutes.
The album never loses the immediacy either, with tracks like ‘C’ and ‘Saku’ picking up the pace before ‘Kodoku Ni’ and ‘Itoshi Wa’ slow down the pace while still keeping the intensity high. But how could you talk about Withering to death. without mentioning ‘THE FINAL’, one of the band’s most popular songs even to this day, a live staple which often finds Kyo simply holding the mic out for the entire song as the audience cries out not just the anthemic hook, but even the verses in his place.
Withering to death. is a once-in-a-lifetime album that just so happens to have been topped twice more in my opinion and once prior, a remarkable feat that most bands in any genre simply can’t say they’ve achieved. I’d say the only unfortunate part about Withering to death. is that its post-release is where the fall-off with their international fandom began, as the following album THE MARROW OF A BONE seemed to have missed the mark for a lot of fans at the time despite overwhelming positive contemporary reviews internationally and receiving a lot of recent reappraisal by fans of the band, leaving Withering to death. a perfectly imperfect storm and an unforgettable moment for Japan’s unparalleled greatest metal band.
Highlights: ‘Merciless Cult’, ‘C’, ‘Machiavellism’, ‘THE FINAL’
10/10
4. VULGAR (2003)
Here’s the other one you might have been mad at me for not putting at #1. VULGAR is both not as heavy as the name might imply yet simultaneously far heavier than Withering To Death. The band’s fourth outing finds them trying to some interesting experiments in darkly sweet hooks and nearly-pop-punk stylings on tracks like ‘Я TO THE CORE’ and ‘CHILD PREY’. Even writing this right now I’m having a hard time even thinking of what the three main highlights I’d pick from this record are because there are truly no skips to be had here. I constantly forget what an incredible experience VULGAR is the entire way through from front to back
The opening track ‘audience KILLER LOOP’ immediately sets the intense and eerie yet melodic tone for the album with it’s reverbed guitar lead harmonies and gorgeous vocal refrains. The following track ‘THE IIID EMPIRE’ shows Diru at the heaviest they’ve ever been up to this point. A few songs down the line, ‘SAJOU NO UTA’ shows us the most passionate and honset vocals from Kyo we’ve ever heard to this point as well. The track that always really sells it for me is ‘KASUMI’, another more passionate ballad-esque song with an unbelievable hook and flanged out guitars during the verses that the band even re-recorded for their 2013 EP THE UNRAVELING.
Also of note is the track OBSCURE, which is accompanied by one of the most infamous music videos of all time (serious trigger warning for gore, sex, vomit, just generally intensely graphic imagery for those about to click, though to even watch the video you need to have a verified YouTube account and click that you acknowledge the warning), allegedly banned in several countries — though I believe this may just be urban legend — and frequently topping “most graphic music videos of all time” lists high above anything Nine Inch Nails ever did in the ‘90s almost two decades later. VULGAR as a whole album is another absolute classic, and could easily go toe-to-toe for first place with the other albums I’ve listed above.
Highlights: ‘audience KILLER LOOP’, ‘SAJOU NO UTA’, ‘KASUMI’, ‘DRAIN AWAY’
10/10, by the way
5. DUM SPIRO SPERO (2011)
Still mad you haven’t seen GAUZE on the list yet? Have you even listened to DUM SPIRO SPERO or did you fall off by this point? You really should give it a chance. Without a doubt the band’s heaviest album to date, DUM SPIRO SPERO only shows the tiniest bit of hesitation from the brutality on the penultimate track ‘VANITAS’. Everything else here is pure, heavy music, the band’s glorified deathcore experiment, and it puts into perspective just how absurd their range is and their mastery of so many styles. To be able to go from gothic rock, to nu metal, to progressive, and then directly to not only a deathcore album but one of the greatest deathcore albums ever recorded is pretty unbelievable.
It was pretty well known that Kyo had a wide vocal range and a powerful scream based on prior albums up to this point, but DUM SPIRO SPERO is the first time Kyo had ever shown just how far his five octave vocal range can go, and on top of that showcase every type of scream you could imagine from low death growls to power fries to pig squeals to the most terrifying high-pitched shrieks you could ever imagine, and he did it both effortlessly and without warning that he could even handle doing all of this.
DUM SPIRO SPERO is — much like 2019’s The Insulated World — unrelentingly heavy during its front half before letting the band’s beloved melodic side shine through towards the back half. Songs like ‘LOTUS’ and ‘AKATSUKI’ are DIR EN GREY to their core even if they trade their usually mid-tempo riffs for something that sort of approaches “deathcore breakdown” criteria without ever letting themselves get that corny or genre-derivate. Despite my claiming that DUM SPIRO SPERO is a “deathcore” album (and the best one of all time at that) it still does it a disservice to box it in with any label like that. Just give it a listen and you’ll know what I mean.
Highlights: ‘DIFFERENT SENSE’, ‘“YOKUSOU NI DREAMBOX” ARUI WA SEIJUKU NO RINEN TO TSUMETAI AME’, ‘HAGESHISA TO KONO MUNE NO NAKA DE KARAMITSUITA SHAKUNETSU NO YAMI’, ‘VANITAS’
10/10
6. GAUZE (1999)
Hey guys, here’s the one. The one you’re probably mad at me for still not seeing on this list. Let’s get this out of the way: GAUZE is an all-time classic, a genre-defining and scene-defining album that means the world to so many visual kei kids out there. My problem with GAUZE that leaves it so low on this list is simply this: formative. It is a perfect debut, there’s no way a band could drop an album as refined as ARCHE first, but they could absolutely drop something like GAUZE to prove that they can get there eventually.
GAUZE’s strongest points are in its potential and slightly discomforting atmosphere. It’s clear that this band knew what they wanted to be at this point, but as seen by the attire they wore during this era, they were simply just trying to get attention first as a visual kei band, dropping the stage costumes and frizzy hair shortly before MACABRE’s release. The proper opening track ‘Schwein no Isu’ has all the staples of modern DIR EN GREY, just more unrefined; the screaming, the pounding drums, the dissonant and feedbacking guitars giving way to chunky palm mutes and more melodic chords.
The following ‘YURAMEKI’, the album’s lead single, is exactly the kind of song you’d expect of a visual kei band of the era, but it’s also the backbone of what DIR EN GREY’s single power would be all the way up to even 2022’s PHALARIS, sharing a little bit in common with a single like ‘Oboro’ in their infectious and dramatic choruses. GAUZE is a classic to so many, and still a valuable part of the band’s discography, a legendary album that kickstarted one of the greatest careers in the history of metal music, an album worth revisiting again and again to this day.
Highlights: ‘raison d’etre’, ‘YOKAN’, ‘-ZAN-’
10/10, oh lord, they’re all 10/10…
7. PHALARIS (2022)
I think it’s going to take time to really figure out what I think of PHALARIS, but ultimately at the moment a few weeks after its release, I still think it’s really damn good. I actually started writing this article a month before PHALARIS dropped. What I can start off by saying is that PHALARIS feels like an amalgam of so many of the bands prior albums while still also feeling uniquely like its own thing. It’s progressive like UROBOROS, Kyo gets bold and creepy with his clean falsettos like on ARCHE, it’s as heavy as DUM SPIRO SPERO and The Insulated World.
And that’s the one thing that had me most hyped for PHALARIS: the preview tracks were such a mixed bag. Excluding the massive 2019 loose single ‘The World Of Mercy’ which didn’t make the cut, the first single ‘Ochita Koto no Aru Sora’ was fairly heavy while the second single ‘Oboro’ had a far more straight forward and melodic sound by comparison. When the band started teasing ‘The Perfume Of Sins’ in the week leading up to the release of the album however, that song demonstrated something that was heavier than anything they had ever done before, complete with black metal-tinged blast beats and low fry screaming.
While we’re still a bit of a ways away from seeing just how well PHALARIS will hold up with the years, I think even a little less than a month after release it feels like it’s only getting better with each listen, just like its predecessor in The Insulated World. The closing track ‘Kamuy’ is the perfect way to cap off this unofficial celebration of the band’s legacy, another long and progressive track that swells until it hits a climax at the ending and slowly let’s us go, ready to hit play again from the top.
Highlights: ‘Oboro’, ‘13’, ‘The Perfume Of Sins’, ‘Kamuy’
9/10, but it’s starting to feel like it’ll grow into a 10.
8. The Insulated World (2018)
The Insulated World takes a while to get. On the surface it feels like DIR EN GREY’s most abrasive and unrelenting album to date, even more-so than DUM SPIRO SPERO, but when you spend some quality time with it you’ll start to notice a lot more of the nuance peaking through the cracks, something that this band’s music have never been foreign to. This abrasive sound greets us immediately, as the opener ‘Keibutsu to Hajimari’ blasts its way in from the first second; no build-up, no warning, just an immediate assault of thundering drums and chunky guitars.
The second track ‘Devote My Life’ is no less intense of a listen, almost reminding me of Axe To Fall and All We Love We Leave Behind-era Converge, a band whose genre is exactly the reference point I’d give for The Insulated World: it’s mostly a metalcore album. As we pass this point however, the band’s own signature blend of dissonant and harmonic starts to reveal itself once again towards the later half of the album. This is most clear on the cleaner, more brooding, more emotional tracks like ‘Aka’ and ‘Followers’, songs that long-time DIR EN GREY listeners likely felt most at-home with upon the album’s release.
While it starts as the band’s hardest yet, The Insulated World opens its arms wide by the back end, welcoming dedicated fans back with a lovely mix of both the familiar sounds of DIR EN GREY’s legacy with a new flirtation in bloodthirsty Converge-esque metalcore. It might take a lot of listens to get into, easily the band’s hardest to truly understand alongside Kisou, but once you’re into The Insulated World you realize it’s just another capstone of in this band’s near-perfect run of albums starting with UROBOROS in 2008, one of if not the greatest 5+ album runs in the history of heavy metal worldwide.
Highlights: ‘Ningen wo Kaburu’, ‘Aka’, ‘Keigaku no Yoku’, ‘Ranunculus’
9/10, maybe even 10/10 depending how I’m feeling.
9. THE MARROW OF A BONE (2007)
Let me preface this by saying if THE MARROW OF A BONE is the worst album in your discography, you’re still a pretty damn great band. Luckily, it isn’t their worst album despite how many fans (especially at the time of its release) would insist otherwise. There’s nothing about this album that I’d consider inherently bad or unlistenable, and I think the initial fan reaction was unprecedented as there’s still a lot of DIR EN GREY’s DNA found throughout.
I’d also go as far as to say ‘NAMAMEKASHIKI ANSOKU, TAMERAI NI HOHOEMI’ is one of my top 10 favorite DIR EN GREY songs ever, so if you make the same mistake that many news fans make of skipping this album altogether, I wouldn’t necessarily blame you based on the hearsay, but I still implore you to at the very least listen to that absolute masterpiece of a song. Other highlights like ‘ROTTING ROOT’ and ‘RYOUJOKU NO AME’ continue to show the band’s usual sound completely unrestrained by any attempts to “appeal to the west” like people often claim this album tried to. I certainly can see where that claim comes from on certain tracks like ‘THE FATAL BELIEVER’, but I wouldn’t say that a song like that isn’t worth listening to either.
Really, THE MARROW OF A BONE gets a bad rap within the band’s overall discography, mostly from old forum posts and just general hearsay, much in the same way newcomers to the Gundam franchise will hear that 1986’s Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ is worth skipping (it’s both incredible and mandatory viewing for many recent UC Gundam works like Unicorn) from people who were simply not in the right headspace for it after Withering to death./Zeta Gundam. Listen to THE MARROW OF A BONE and watch Gundam ZZ.
Highlights: ‘RYOUJOKU NO AME’, ‘ROTTING ROOT’, ‘NAMAMEKASHIKI ANSOKU, TAMERAI NI HOHOEMI’, ‘THE DEEPER VILENESS’
8/10
10. MACABRE (2000)
Not even a year after their debut, DIR EN GREY takes a plunge into the unknown with MACABRE, their first experiment in truly dark music and progressive songwriting. The intro track ‘DEITY’ kicks off with an eerie and atmospheric buildup into pounding drums and chugging guitars, with the vocals picking up towards the end, muffled in the back and layered into an almost choir-like haunt.
It’s not all progressive, though, as tracks like the following ‘MYAKU’ and ‘WAKE’ are essentially a little more in-line with the visual kei stylings of the band’s debut album GAUZE, not fully escaping their roots just yet. That being said, there’s still something a little more on the gloomy side here than other visual kei bands of the time like L’arc~En~Ciel. Meanwhile, songs like ‘Hydra’ pick up the intensity and show the band’s first true foray into scream-centric metal, showing a lot more in common with what they were going to do after on Kisou than what they had already done on GAUZE.
Its tracks like ‘HOTARUBI’ and ‘【KR】cube’ that really make MACABRE special in my opinion however, blending both that classic DIR EN GREY single sound with more progressive experiments, yielding in wildly fun results. Another huge standout is the album’s namesake track ‘MACABRE’, a 10 minute piece that honestly sees the band achieve on just a single song what they ended up doing almost a decade later on UROBOROS. MACARBRE is the change in sound that the band needed at the time if they were going to continue evolving alongside maintaining and growing a dedicated, open-minded fanbase.
Highlights: ‘HOTARUBI’, ‘MACABRE’, ‘audrey’
7/10
11. KISOU (2002)
Yeah, that’s right. I think Kisou is the worst DIR EN GREY album. Sue me, I guess. Do not mistake me here, Kisou is an incredible album, but there are some ultimately forgettable tracks that get lost in its length and unfulfilled ambition in my opinion. Like MACABRE, Kisou is one of the band’s earliest experiments at progressive songwriting, something that the band would skip out on for the next few albums, not coming back to it until THE MARROW OF A BONE in 2007 and ultimately perfecting on UROBOROS in 2008.
A lot of fans really seem to love Kisou, even labelling it as the band’s greatest album to date, and I truly couldn’t come up with better words to describe how assuring that is to the quality of a band’s discography when what I would consider their worst album by only a hair is considered their best album by a wide margin by others.
Kisou starts heavy with the track ‘kigan’, a progressive cut that blurs the lines between alt rock, nu metal, and even a bit of hardcore punk, a genre that the band has fooled around with a few times before, with Kyo citing bands like The Adicts and Bauhaus as heavy influences. This dissonant punk-ish sound continues on the following ZOMBOID and a handful of other tracks throughout the album, while also showing the early stages of their signature melodic pop-appealing hook writing present throughout their entire discography on tracks like ‘24 CYLINDERS’, ‘embryo’, and ‘undecided’, with the latter track opening up the much softer B-side of the LP. If Kisou is truly the worst album in your discography, you’ve done something right with your career.
Highlights: ‘24 CYLINDERS’, ‘Bottom of the death valley’, ‘JESSICA’
7/10 is still a pretty good score.