Cold Can, Strange Rhythms

My everyday playlist is a deliberate kind of chaos—J-pop, K-pop, whatever electronic thing I found at two in the morning—blended into something that functions across every mood: heads-down work, wandering without destination, sitting in the dark feeling sorry for myself. Tricot has lived in that playlist for years. The all-female Kyoto trio belongs there in a way that’s hard to articulate, which is probably something to do with how they occupy the space between pretty and genuinely disorienting.

The single "Melon Soda," pulled from their 2017 album 3, opens with something that sounds almost gentle and then quietly makes itself impossible to follow in a straight line. The rhythm shifts without announcing itself. By the time you notice you’ve lost the beat, you’re already somewhere else entirely. That’s the Tricot trick: danceability and complexity sharing the same square meter without apologizing to each other.

Stereogum once wrote that they move from dancing to chasing, from ecstatic to austere, which is accurate and still undersells how melodic they are underneath all the angles. This isn’t math-rock as a technical exercise, as a way of showing how many notes you can pack into a bar. It’s something tighter and stranger, with actual songs living inside the architecture. Anyone with even a passing tolerance for J-rock will find something here. 3 came out on Big Scary Monsters in Europe and Topshelf Records in the US.