1992
The band entered the studio from January 6-February 13 to record their upcoming album. Before going into the studio, they spent some time rehearsing but Toll reflected that he would liked to have spent more time rehearsing. They were occupying 2-3 studios at a time with the members recording their different parts. Atsushi remarked he was entering the studio as early as 8pm and leaving as late as 1pm the next day. Though the studio time was grueling, the band chose to reduce their concerts and played roughly half the amount of shows as compared to the year prior. It is no surprise then that this year the band played no new prefectures for the first time.
On March 21, the compilation Dance 2 Noise 002 was released. This time it featured a collaboration with Xymox (The Netherlands) and Atsushi performing a song entitled "Yokan". Xymox wrote the music and Atsushi wrote the lyrics. Atsushi apparently went to England for the recording.
Koroshi No Shirabe ~This is NOT Greatest Hits~ was released on March 21, 1992. The title is actually an old one--it was a contender for their very first album in 1987, back in the Indies days. (They decided to name it Hurry Up Mode and leave "Koroshi No Shirabe" on the artwork in parenthesis but their website and official history books never mention what is in parenthesis so I take it that it was not a sub-title for that album, although Hisashi says it was.) This 1992 sub-title of "This is NOT Greatest Hits" was likely for fans and critics who may have thought it was a compilation of their "hits" but it really wasn't. With this album, Buck-Tick went to back to the studio and spent many hours reworking old songs that they felt they could not express properly the first time they were released. They spent over 1300 hours in the studio for this album, roughly the equivalent of recording two-three albums. Some of the reworked songs have minor touchups that make the song even stronger, while some sound completely different from the original. One might say that this album started their tradition of reworking older songs, or self covers, but that actually started the previous year when they re-recorded "Angelic Conversation" for a b-side.
A twenty-three date tour for the album, called This is NOT Greatest Tour, began on March 14. This tour was about half the length of their 2 previous tours for studio albums but they still managed to play the remote island of Okinawa. During the tour, the entire band wore a uniform of sorts, a red armband, most likely inspired by Yellow Magic Orchestra when they did the same, given that Hisashi is a huge YMO fan. The Japanese punk band Anarchy also wore red arm bands and Buck-Tick originally started as a punk-influenced band so this is a strong possibility too. This is the only time in their history that they had such a unifying piece of clothing for a tour. They have had a thematic look for artwork or a music video, but that is usually a one-off and does not carry forth to the live performance. It may be one thing to purposely dress in dark clothing, but this red armband was quite distinct.
As there were no singles released from this album, when Buck-Tick would make television appearances to promote the album, they would often play "Oriental Love Story" so one might have thought it was a single. The band performed "Oriental Love Story" on "Music Station" on April 17 and the brief interview portion was on how many hours it took to record the album of self-covers.
A two day event called Climax Together was held at Yokohama Arena on September 10 and 11. It was filmed and a video was released on December 2 entitled Climax Together. The same day a book entitled BT8982: Buck-Tick's Metamorphosis 1989-1992 was released by the publishers of the magazine "Rockin' On Japan". It was a collection of photos and articles published by the magazine from 1989 through 1992.
On October 21, Soft Ballet released Million Mirrors. Hisashi plays electric guitar on the track "Meddler".