Chilli Beans. -- pineapple!

Recently, the mother of an old friend of mine passed away. Wishing my condolences to her family, I remember when a bunch of us in the Japanese language school class visited my friend's house in the suburbs as teenagers, my friend's mother made some scrumptious Pineapple Upside-Down Cake that made quite the impression on me. In fact, I've now ended up making the cake myself occasionally for my own family. From what I've learned, Pineapple Upside-Down Cake is something of a dessert that had first become popular in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, perhaps when Hawaii became an official state.

I've started out with this culinary confession because when I first talked about the pop trio Chilli Beans. and their "Lemonade" back in 2022, I started with a Cowboy Kent Rollins video on another favourite of mine, Chili Cheese Dogs (though I don't think I can really eat those anymore for my aging gastrointestinal tract). Why I hadn't talked about lemonade rather than chili dogs has escaped my mind.

Anyways, coming to November 2025, I see that Moto, Maika and Lily are still happily bringing their brand of sunny garage pop. But according to their music video for "pineapple!", the ladies have finally gotten out of the house, gotten hair dye treatments and gotten that wonderful vacation to the Aloha State. Everyone was involved in the creation of "pineapple!" which has also included some mellow groove although I wouldn't categorize it as Neo-City Pop. 

"pineapple!" is the final track on Chilli Beans.' latest digital EP from June 2025, "the outside wind". It managed to reach No. 46 on Oricon.

Chilli Beans. -- lemonade

 

In my gastrointestinally stronger days, chili and chili dogs were some of my go-to foods. When I was visiting and later working at the International Student Centre at the University of Toronto, I became good friends with the house cook there, Vera, and whenever I ordered a chili dog, she would literally bury the hot dog in chili. Didn't complain one bit. It was worth the ten seconds of digging to unearth the hot dog. But over the years, my stomach and intestines gradually asked me to retire from the chili dog, so I finally acquiesced, and it's now been a couple of decades since I had it. Meanwhile, enjoy the above video by Cowboy Kent Rollins. I've been subscribed to his YouTube channel for over a year now, thanks to his down-home cooking.

Chilli Beans. is a female trio of popsters consisting of Moto, Maika and Lily. They formed up in 2019 when they were all students at Ongaku Juku Voice（音楽塾ヴォイス...Music School Voice）, a facility for vocal training set up in 1997 that has two schools in Tokyo and Fukuoka. According to an interview referenced through their J-Wiki profile, the name of the band didn't come from anything food-related, though. It was just that the first word was inspired from the rock band Red Hot Chili Peppers and the second was a reference to the fact that they were a band that was just sprouting from the ground, ready to walk the path to greatness.

Their first works came out in 2021 including a debut EP titled "dancing alone" which was released in August. One of the tracks, "lemonade", which was created by the band and fellow Ongaku Juku Voice graduate Vaundy, is a sunny guitar-driven tune which seems to have some tsundere theme in mind. A young lady is in the middle of an existential tug-of-war between love and hate for a cool guy, but it looks like the former emotion is beginning to drag most of the rope to its side. Maybe the domesticity of the music video setting is sparking it, but perhaps I could call the genre covered here California garage pop.

A full album by Chilli Beans. came out earlier this year in July titled "Chilli Beans." on CD. It peaked at No. 28 on Oricon. In any case, if I had still been eating chili dogs, with all due respect to the band, I wouldn't have been downing lemonade with my old lunch dish. I'd have preferred to be drinking a lot of milk instead.