#20 Hikaru Utada Hatsukoi At their best, pop stars turn the personal into the populist — they make songs for everyone, not for themselves, even if the inspiration comes from inside. Hikaru Utada’s 2016 comeback album Fantome stands as one of the 2010s most fascinating album, wrestling with loss and maturity in a way few…
By releasing two stellar albums of easy-breezy but emotionally twisty electronic music in 2018, AOTQ reminds that you can come up with some really interesting ideas if you just keep exploring an approach that has worked before. The parts making up Alone aren’t all that different from what appeared earlier this year on E-muzak. It’s…
The influence of vaporwave is starting to become clear. The internet-based niche genre of electronic music that turned into a visual aesthetic has recently started being visually adopted by legit mainstream artists in the West, while musically more producers are taking cues from it — or at least being inspired by it. Japan, more so…
Mega Drive takes a lot of expectations and flips them around. The compilation serves as fledgling label Local Visions’ first release, and gathers artists from Japan and abroad together to dabble primarily in styles that would be seen as niche genre by most — and with arguably the main sounds being touched on across Mega…