The Future Is Already Playing

A whole summer in Tokyo with nothing on repeat but Spending All My Time—that particular Perfume track that sounds like what pop would be if designed by someone who loved machines and melancholy in equal measure. Kashiyuka, Nocchi, A~chan: three women making something that has no comfortable Western genre equivalent. They sit near Sōtaisei Riron and Shiina Ringo in a corner of my brain labeled "Japanese pop that actually means something," kept separate from the massive idol-factory output of AKB48, which is its own endlessly fascinating machine.

Sweet Refrain does what a good Perfume track always does. Eight-bit textures underneath a production that’s somehow both lush and stripped. A drop that opens like a room you didn’t know was there. Lyrics circling dreams, wonder, memory—in that cryptic register where you can’t tell if the opacity is a translation problem or entirely the point. It doesn’t matter. It reaches somewhere that reading the lyrics in translation never could, which is my best argument for why J-pop, at its peak, runs circles around most of what comes out of Europe.