The heart is a monstrous thing. When we’re young and heartbreaks come easy, it seems so true it’s barely worth acknowledging. If we’re lucky, we grow up and spend the rest of our lives forgetting this fact— an artifact of our awkwardly remembered angsty, pining teenage years. But for most, there’s a day sooner or […]
For Tracy Hyde is not your average Japanese shoegaze band. In Ethernity, the dream pop quintet defy genre and thematic expectations, openly taking on political themes and merging them with their classic ethereal sound to produce an album that is as uneasy as it is transcendental. For Tracy Hyde’s first three albums were geared more […]
Nana Yamato’s life changed when she stumbled into BIG LOVE RECORDS, a record store located in Harajuku, Tokyo. Born and raised in Chiba, Japan, a rural city that Yamato describes as having “no culture,” Yamato moved to Tokyo in 2019. There, in that record store where she worked, Yamato found both the inspiration and freedom […]
Japanese pop/R&B singer RIRI is destined to become a major star. Take a listen to her show-stopping pop banger “HONEY” and flirtatious anthem “That’s My Baby,” and it’s easy to see the reasons why SONY Music signed her onto their label so early on. It’s hard to believe that RIRI, who has a beautifully expansive […]
Hong Kong-based rock group Prune Deer (話梅鹿) made their return last week with their brash single “Return,” featuring a very familiar voice in the Asian indie scene: Japanese experimental musician harunemuri 春ねむり (Haruna Kimishima). Though the two up-and-coming groups come from very different countries, “Return” manages to find the best of both genres, creating a […]