Hide Your Face

Hide Your Face is the debut album by Japanese musician hide, released on February 23, 1994. It reached number 1 on the Oricon Albums Chart and was certified Double Platinum by the RIAJ for sales over 500,000 copies. It was named one of the top albums from 1989-1998 in a 2004 issue of the music magazine Band Yarouze. Overview hide embarked on a solo career in 1993 due to the downtime in X Japan. Initially wanting to hire several different vocalists because he was unsure of his own voice, he eventually began taking vocal lessons from Toshi's coach and sang the material himself. The song "Frozen Bug '93 (Diggers Version)" is a remixed version of "Frozen Bug", a song that hide wrote and performed with Luna Sea members J and Inoran, under the band name M*A*S*S, for the 1993 compilation Dance 2 Noise 004. Wanting to contrast something unusual with a pop background, hide hired Yukinojo Mori to pen the lyrics to his first two A-side singles. As a kid, hide was fond of Bow Wow's 1982 album Warning from Stardust, where the A-side songs had lyrics in English and the B-side in Japanese. Liking the Japanese lyrics better, hide only realized Mori was their author afterwards. Together with the music for "Frozen Bug", "Eyes Love You" and "50% & 50%" are the only songs hide released for his solo career that he did not write himself. The album's cover art features a reproduction of a mask, originally created by H. R. Giger, by Screaming Mad George and Joanne Bloomfield.