Burning In
My first summer in Tokyo, ’Spending all my Time’ by Perfume was everywhere—the kind of everywhere that isn’t annoying yet because it seems inevitable. You’d hear it in Harajuku shops, in cafes, in clubs at night. The drums were plastic and bright, the vocals thin and processed, and after maybe the hundredth time you stopped resisting it. The song had just installed itself.
Perfume’s been at this since 2000—three women named Kashiyuka, Nocchi, and A~chan making electronic pop that’s simultaneously minimal and vast. Albums like ’Cosmic Explorer’ and ’Game’ made them international. They tour everywhere now: Taiwan, Singapore, Britain. The live shows are synchronized, precise, like watching three people pilot a single machine.
’If you wanna’ is their new one, and it works the same way. Electronic, poppy, exactly what you expect from them. The production is immaculate in that impersonal way they do, vocals processed until they barely sound human. But like ’Spending all my Time,’ it doesn’t hit on the first listen, or the second. It’s the seventh time, the eighth, the hundredth. Every repetition adds a little more weight until the whole thing feels inevitable, like a thought you’ve always had.
There’s something almost insidious about their work—the way they know exactly how to make songs that drill themselves into you through sheer exposure. Not through trying hard or bombast. Just by existing somewhere you keep hearing them. You resist it, then you stop resisting it, then you can’t get it out.
Maybe that’s the real skill, knowing how patience and precision can feel like magic. That might be why they’ve lasted this long.