Wrong Planet, Right Music
Japanese music has been doing something strange and ambitious for decades—pop and underground moving in parallel, borrowing from each other, producing these small moments of genuine weirdness that leak out into the world through YouTube and Bandcamp and the kinds of forums where people type in all lowercase at 3am. This week offered another solid batch.
Amazarashi’s Monday arrives exactly as heavy as the day it describes. We threw Monday onto the curb,
sings Akita. Even the garbage man ignored it, so it rolled around and rusted in the sea air. Maybe we’re all living on the wrong planet.
That’s not a clumsy translation—that’s exactly the register Amazarashi operate in, a slow-burning existential exhaustion that stops just short of giving up entirely.
Kenshi Yonezu’s Lemon is something else. Born in Tokushima, he built his reputation through Vocaloid tracks released under the name Hachi before going public under his real name in 2012. Lemon is the kind of song that sits with you after a loss—How wonderful it would be if all of this were just a dream,
he sings, and then: You taught me that there are kinds of happiness that never come back.
It sounds like grief that has already accepted itself.
Haru Nemuri fits somewhere in the orbit of Daoko, KOM_I from Suiyoubi No Campanella, and Seiko Oomori—artists doing something that blurs rap and pop and spoken word in ways that feel genuinely personal rather than calculated. Her song ゆめをみよう and her album Atom Heart Mother both carry that energy: melodic when it needs to be, hard when it doesn’t.
Mondo Grosso is the project of Shinichi Osawa, a DJ from Shiga who has been filling the underground club floors of Shibuya for years. His track False Sympathy features Aina The End, vocalist for BiSH, whose voice cuts through the electronic production in a way that earns the song its title. This will be in every Tokyo club over the next few months, in at least six different remixes.
Tofubeats—Yusuke Kawai from Kobe—is the kind of bedroom producer who built a genuine international following through YouTube and Bandcamp before anyone official noticed. His track ふめつのこころ feels like a move toward something more mainstream, but he keeps enough of the experimental edge to make it interesting rather than just accessible. Not everyone will appreciate that balance. That’s fine.
Tokyo duo Chocoholic and Lulu X made Touch, which is small and pink and deliberately low-key—chill-pop that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to be anything else. You won’t find it in the big clubs. That’s the point. It’s the kind of song you discover through a friend who heard it in some backroom bar and saved the Shazam.
Oresama is J-pop at its most unapologetic—bright, melodic, fronted by a voice that does exactly what the genre requires. They’ve built a following in anime and manga communities, and Hi-Fi Train doesn’t deviate from that formula. The video is a cartoon adventure through Shibuya in full color, and for its duration, everything pressing and difficult about the world is simply not there.
Sky-Hi—Mitsuhiro Hidaka from Chiba, also a member of AAA—does something with American hip-hop production that feels absorbed rather than borrowed. His track 何様, with Boku no Lyric no Boyomi, makes the argument for Japanese hip-hop better than any critical piece could.
Back-On from Tokyo built their reputation mixing hard beats with aggressive delivery while staying pop enough to chart, but Clown carries the slightly diminished energy of a band that has lost most of its original lineup. Teeda and Kenji03 are still here; Shu, Gori, Macchin, and Icchan are not. The song is solid. The old brightness has gone somewhere.
Empire close this out with Buttocks Beat! Beat!, which is exactly what the title promises—idol music with loud rock inserts, propulsive and ridiculous, the kind of thing you put on at full volume alone in your apartment and do the most embarrassing dancing of your life to. Their debut album The Empire Strikes Start!! came out in April. You can probably imagine.