What Landed This Week
Some music videos are trying to make a statement. Empire’s Buttocks Beat! Beat!
is not interested in statements. It’s just a running ass chasing girls through the frame while they get beaten up. The song underneath is pure adrenaline—loud idol pop with heavy guitar, the kind of thing you could genuinely lose your mind to in your apartment at midnight, dancing alone with the lights off.
But that’s only one flavor of what came out this week. Amazarashi’s Monday
takes the other direction entirely—Akita singing about how Mondays are so repulsive, so deadening, that even the garbage man just leaves them on the curb. It’s genuinely bleak, philosophical in a way that’s completely unpretentious. And it works because he’s not trying to make misery sound profound; he’s just describing how it feels to wake up and know you have to do it again.
Tofubeats has been doing this for years now—starting as a bedroom producer on YouTube and Bandcamp, now in the actual mainstream, but still experimental in a way that doesn’t care if it lands with everyone. His new track ふめつのこころ
is exactly what you’d expect from him: intricate, slightly weird, refusing to simplify itself for radio. He grew up in Kobe, built his whole career on the internet, and never stopped taking chances.
Kenshi Yonezu came up through Vocaloid production under a different name, which probably sounds like a footnote, but it explains everything about how he thinks. Lemon
is about the end of something—about learning that certain kinds of happiness don’t come back. There’s a line about hidden darkness staying hidden if you’d never known someone. It’s the kind of thing that would sound overwrought in English, but he’s just stating it plainly, and somehow that makes it hurt more.
Then there’s the other pole: Oresama is pure color and melody, unapologetic idol pop. Their new video is a cartoon adventure through Shibuya, bright and bouncing, the kind of thing that just erases whatever was bothering you. Sometimes you need that. Sometimes pop should just be pop without apology. And Sky-Hi is mixing American hip-hop with Japanese style in 何様,
rough and pop at once, and it works because he’s not trying to prove anything—just doing both at the same time.
Mondo Grosso is what you’d hear in the underground clubs in Shibuya—a DJ project that’s been filling dance floors for years. His new track False Sympathy
has a vocalist from BiSH layered over the beat, and it’s already rotating through Tokyo clubs in a dozen remixes. That’s the other pulse of the city entirely: not introspection, just bodies moving, bass, someone else’s voice floating over it all.
Then you get artists like Back-On, who’ve been doing this for years, who should be at their peak but somehow don’t feel like it anymore. Clown
is technically fine, but there’s something missing—the band’s been through member changes, and you can feel the wear. And Chocoholic comes through with this chill pop thing, Touch,
which is exactly what it needs to be: sweet without being precious, the kind of song that plays quietly in some Tokyo backroom and just works.
What strikes me this week is the sheer range—Amazarashi killing you with darkness, Empire being completely ridiculous, Tofubeats still pushing at the edges, Yonezu turning loss into language, Oresama just being joyful about it. None of it sounds like it came from the same place, and I’m not sure that’s accidental.