Netflix’s surprise hit Aggretsuko will be receiving a death metal-filled Christmas special next week, titled Aggretsuko: We Wish You A Metal Christmas. For the uninitiated, Aggretsuko is a workplace comedy that follows the day-to-day life of mild-mannered Retsuko, a 25-year-old red panda with a soul-crushing office job in accounting. The title, which means aggressive Retsuko, reveals her secret: She’s always angry. To get through the day, she often needs to suppress her outrage and after work finds catharsis by performing death metal songs at a local karaoke bar.

After Aggretsuko season 1 debuted on Netflix earlier this year, it gained a following among Western audiences, enough that the streaming company is planning a second season. Before the second season arrives, though, Retsuko will return for a Christmas special. Now, Netflix has released a first look and release date for that Christmas special.

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The streaming company announced the 22-minute Christmas special alongside a trailer full of metal. Netflix also clarified that fans will have to wait a while longer for the second season to release sometime in 2019. Further, Netflix revealed that the episode will feature a performance by Tim Armstrong, frontman of the punk band Rancid, and his project Tim Timebomb and the Interrupters. The punk band has recorded their own special rendition of “Jingle Bells” to play during the opener of the episode and the credits. You can hear a snippet of it in the Christmas special's trailer, which can be viewed below.

Aggretsuko: We Wish You A Metal Christmas will deal with the adorable and rage-filled Retsuko obsessively seeking validation from her social media account only to find that her posting behavior has put her holiday in jeopardy. With her Christmas on the line, Retsuko will need to draw on her wits, chillness, and earth-shattering anger to put things right while dealing with the advances of her co-worker Haida. The episode will premiere just in time for Christmas on December 20.

If the characters have a somewhat familiar Hello Kitty aesthetic, that would be because Sanrio, the creators of Hello Kitty, also created Retsuko. The angry red panda began appearing in a series of 100 one-minute comedy shorts that aired during the Ō-sama no Brunch program on the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS) back in 2016. The shorts proved to be so popular that Netflix snagged the rights to create an original series based on them in 2017, with season 1 debuting in April. The studio and team behind the shorts all came back to create longer episodes with a much bigger budget that shows in the animation quality.

The show itself became something of a sleeper hit on Netflix. Many people, especially western audiences who had never been exposed to Aggretsuko in the shorts, were blindsided by the comedic rage emanating from the adorable cartoon panda. Now fans of the show will have a new episode to chew on for the holidays and a second season confirmed to be coming in the next year. Happy holidays indeed!

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Aggretsuko: We Wish You A Metal Christmas premieres December 20 on Netflix.

Source: Netflix