Another 12 months down, and that means it is time to have some fun and go extra-long for year-end content. Japanese music generally felt either too focused on celebrating the fading days of the Heisei era or on crowning new J-pop superstars for the next generation — or giving us truly left-field viral hits like Da Pump’s “U.S.A.,” a shining beacon of Internet unpredictability in a time of Web fakery. But both mainstream and underground ecosystems produced a lot of really good music this year, to the point where getting this list down to 50 proved surprisingly difficult. But the ones here deserve shine as ears turn to 2019.
As always, this list is compiled by just me (despite occasional dips into “we,” this operation remains me and whoever I can get to make sure WordPress doesn’t explode) and represents my favorite releases from Japan over the past 12 months. While I still go for a classic numerical ranking, I also think it’s important to note the whole goal with this isn’t so much canon-building or flexing my taste, but rather to offer a different perspective on the year usually (read: always) overlooked by English-language media. So really…follow along, listen and see if you find something you love that normally wouldn’t hit your radar.
Honorable Mentions: Secret Songs released one new Taquwami song a day back in October, and boy was I tempted to lump all those together and count it as a release. But I’ve resisted, though I urge you to listen to all that material from a producer always ten steps ahead of everyone else (pop music today sounds closer to Taquwami circa 2013…it’s crazy!). IZ*ONE’s COLOR*IZ album features one of my favorite singles of the year and a few nifty album cuts, but has been absorbed by K-pop. Last, Moe Shop’s Moe Moe features a boatload of Japanese guests and is basically the best Yasutaka Nakata release of the year, despite not coming from Yasutaka Nakata. It’s what happens when “kawaii bass” or whatever you want to call it goes through a French Touch filter, and it’s fantastic. But it falls into that weird space where the artist behind it was based in France when creating it (although they live in Japan now), and it’s more of an internet creation anyway. So…keeping it off, though it gets high marks from me all the same.
#50 Upusen Signal
Heisei daydreaming, “Plastic Love,” retreats into imagined versions of the past to escape the nightmare of modern times — nostalgia hung over pop culture throughout 2018, especially in Japan. That’s a theme popping up constantly in the country’s musical output too, and no label did yesteryear-gazing better than Local Visions over the last 12 months. Producer Upusen’s Signal offered one of the more straightforward memory washes from the upstart label, providing eight synth-driven tracks begging to be paired with .gif files of anime women. But Upusen does it so well here, adding a persistent thump throughout elevating vaporous numbers like “Float” and “Underwater” well beyond “Resonance” imitation. And lurking throughout, from the 8-bit chimes of “No Contact” to the hazy cruise of “Daydream Drive,” are those little touches pulling ennui strings, but never feeling cheap about it. Get it here, or listen below.
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