Nagoya duo Memoryhook deal in small moments that feel big. The new group — founded this year, going off of social media — crafts heart-on-sleeve indie-pop that refuses to be fragile. They have too much energy spread out across debut release I Whisper It to warrant that adjective. Just listen to the bounce of “My…
Nostalgia comes up a lot in discussions of music around these parts, because looking back and drawing (or straight-up using) the past has felt pretty central to a lot of music / culture globally in recent times. Synth-pop quartet Hello, Wendy! offer up something closer to a history lesson. At least partially the idea of…
“Matryoshka” features the most jarring moment yet in Suiyoubi No Campanella’s career to date. It comes early, when a voice that isn’t KOM_I’s enters, stage right. It comes courtesy of Pablo Padovani of French group Moodoïd (and…I didn’t know this until the video dropped…was part of Melody’s Echo Chamber). But it could have been Hatsune…
This current wave of slacked-out indie-rock in Japan gets the chilled-out, enjoying-life part down pretty well…but everything always seems a touch too neat. All these bands that found Mac DeMarco, bought a beanie and picked up guitars sing about eating pancakes, walking around the town or just being vaguely optimistic about the future. Too responsible!…
There’s probably a timeline where tofubeats spends the majority of his career working behind the scenes to create top-notch J-pop, while also having a lesser-known solo thing too. Plenty of folks have done that in history! But he’s starting to go down a path closer to Tetsuya Komuro, wherein his own projects get the spotlight…