The Hiroshima Pop Machine

Perfume are a Japanese electro-pop trio—Ayano Ōmoto, Yuka Kashino, and Ayaka Nishiwaki, all three from Hiroshima—and listening to them for the first time is the closest I’ve come to understanding why someone might describe a sound as a controlled substance. The radiation joke is available if you want it. I’ll leave it on the table.

Their tracks have names like "Computer Driving," "Vitamin Drop," and "Electro World," and they deliver exactly what those names suggest: something installed in the back of the skull at a frequency slightly higher than comfortable. Producer Yasutaka Nakata handles everything—immaculate, cold, deliberately synthetic—and Perfume delivers it with a cheerful precision that makes you smile against your will. The vocals are processed into something adjacent to human, a texture somewhere between a voice and a keyboard patch, and somehow that makes the whole thing more affecting, not less.

I made the mistake of putting them on as background music while working. Forty minutes later I was staring at a corner of the room that I found inexplicably fascinating. I’ve listened to them regularly since. It explains some things about my output during that period.

Put "Electro World" on at full volume and give it the attention it demands. Or don’t, and just let it rewire something quietly in the background. Either way you won’t come out exactly the same. Akihabalove.