Passepied and the Colors of the Night

When I say this journal covers Japanese pop culture, I mean it—which means occasionally I need to actually do that instead of just announcing it. The band that’s had me by the throat lately is Passepied, a Tokyo outfit named after a historic French baroque dance, which is exactly the kind of layered, slightly absurdist self-presentation that Japanese pop does better than anyone. They’re being played relentlessly in clubs across the city, and their track MATATABISTEP is the reason why.

The song is about the things that belong to the night—drinking, loosening, the particular freedom that arrives after the sun goes down and the rules start to feel negotiable. It’s about dancing, specifically: not the kind that’s a performance for someone else, but the kind where you stop tracking yourself and just move. There’s a lightness to it that feels hard-won rather than manufactured. Passepied doesn’t sound like a band trying to inject color into anything—they sound like the color was already there and they just opened the door.