Berlin by Way of Tokyo

The German-Japanese cultural collision usually produces exactly the kitsch you’d expect—sushi-bratwurst fusion, anime in lederhosen, Neuschwanstein selfies with Pikachu plushies. Which is why Osca keeps surprising me. The Berlin-based art pop trio—Japanese singer Yuka Otsuki alongside German musicians Matthias Erhard and Dominik Scherer—operates in a different register entirely. Darker, stranger, and more sincere than the sum of its influences suggests.

At the end of 2018, the German Embassy in Tokyo invited them for a run of six concerts. By the time it was over, they’d played on rooftops, in theater spaces, in TV studios barely larger than a closet, and they’d somehow brought panda dancing bears, giant stuffed animals, and latex princesses along for the whole thing. An ecstatic crowd, a giant moon overhead, an encore that involved an enigmatic water ballet in a traditional Japanese bathhouse. It sounds like a fever dream—apparently it was one.

All of that—the noodle soups, the sensory overload, the deep dive into Japanese childhood imagery—fed into their single Youth, which arrived shortly after. It’s more accessible than their earlier experimental work, which isn’t a concession so much as a natural expansion. If you’re burned out on the same rotation of American pop records and want to remember that the edges of the world are sometimes closer than they seem, Osca is a reasonable place to look.