It’s critically-acclaimed female global dance sensations Tuesday!

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Patrick St. Michel: Joseph Campbell’s monomyth pattern starts with a hero finding themselves in an ordinary place, before receiving the “call to adventure,” which will thrust them into alien worlds. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu’s earliest songs concerned themselves with childlike glee, bouncing around on a fuel made up of beauty products, sweets and single syllables. Yet on October 2012 single “Fashion Monster,” Kyary starts growing up, and becomes aware of how some people perceive her home, Harajuku, and the fashion coming from it. It’s self-awareness that signals growing up, and her next single served as an official coming-of-age celebration. Then she dove into her home nation’s past, which prepared her for her journey to an unknown land. It’s appropriate “Invader Invader” debuted live during her brief United States tour this Spring because it’s all about spreading the Kyary goodness around the globe. “Let’s conquer the world!” goes part of the chorus, and Kyary’s probably the only Japanese pop star going, give or take Perfume, who can actually do what no J-Pop act has done before — actually get decent attention outside of Asia. “Invader” features all the hallmarks of a great Kyary song — ear-worm chorus, bleepy touches, a bouncy tempo, a lighthearted feel. Yet “Invader” also finds her refusing to pander, avoiding the mistakes of Pink Lady and Hikaru Utada. And yeah, I see the brostep breakdown, but that’s part of the reason this gets bumped up one more point. The drop, along with the elementary-school-recorder-class vibe and Kyary’s presentation in general, is confrontational, “Invader” pushing everything that defines Kyary (pop, “kawaii”-ness, a touch of the grotesque manifest as wub-wub) to the front. People in Japan and abroad love her because of these things… but lots of people also hate her for these very same qualities. Here, she makes like the best and brushes those folks aside and just does Kyary. Hell of a start in the unknown.     
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Alfred Soto: Wow — late nineties Stereolab played at 45 rpm. I’d tolerate the scrunches and whooshes and tricky rhythm changes if the vocals didn’t grate. Terrific guitar outro though.
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Anthony Easton: The rough-textured (almost noise) brackish sounds that come around the two minute mark, distance the cute for cute sake vocals of the rest of the track, while the brief hint of sped-up bells around the end of the song rachet up to a level of almost uncomfortable parody. The distance from genre and the falling completely into genre, competing against each other, suggests a kind of arch formalism that has not quite decayed. 
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Brad Shoup: Chiptune, brostep, maybe a little Marnie Stern: Yasutaka Nakata always seems to locate placidity in the funnest places. Here, he hacks out a chill space after awesomely annoying ringtone klaxons and brutalist guitar lines. “I guess I’m an invader,” grins Kyary, but with a track this teeming, she’s operating in stealth.
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Mallory O’Donnell: YMO as seven year old girls married to dragons. Best part: with almost any rudimentary sound editing software you can edit out all the dubstep bits.
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Iain Mew: I’ll start with the dubstep, because I sort of have to. First, it is a very Nakata bit of dubstep. It’s still pleasurably abrasive, but it’s also meticulous and controlled, just a few noises stabilised by a constant beat that carries on after. Secondly, the moment when the noise ends and is replaced by the cheeriest twinkle of piano is amazing, playing up the comic absurdity of a Kyary Pamyu Pamyu song with a dubstep section and then riding it out flawlessly. The preview of that moment after the first chorus works the same trick just as well on a smaller scale. Elsewhere is actually where the most chaos happens, from Kyary’s “whoa whoa whoa” stretching the tune to its limits to the broken merry-go-round synth sections, every bit a surprise and delight. In some ways it’s finally the song to match her visuals, and it’s probably her best single to date.
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Will Adams: No surprise, Nakata is just as skilled at dubstep as he is at the dancepop that first caught my attention with Perfume. “Invader Invader” is cut from the same cloth as “Fashion Monster,” its uptempo bounce supporting a chorus that asks you to jump off your feet. The winning moment, however, is the second verse, when the harder half-time beats meet with beautiful piano arpeggios. Kyary continues to win me over with her maximalist pop.
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Jonathan Bogart: Her sonic aesthetic finally catches up to the gonzo of her visual aesthetic. It’s fitting, in a way, that dubstep is what gets her there: the most vulgarly lead-footed sound in modern pop still retains its synapse-scrambling potentialities when juxtaposed against the clockwork sugar-rush of Kyary’s baseline sound. 
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Katherine St Asaph: The sound of five toy motion detectors cheering each other on as they overclock.
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