Twenty Years In, Ringo Shiina Is Still Accelerating
The West never really caught on to Ringo Shiina, and I’ve long since stopped being surprised by that. She operates at a scale most pop music never reaches—not commercial scale, not streaming scale, but the scale of genuine artistic weight, the kind that makes everything around it feel provisional. I’ve been with her since Muzai Moratorium, since she was still a sharp-edged rock newcomer with a voice like a blowtorch, and watching her transform across Shōso Strip, Karuki Samen Kuri no Hana, and Sanmon Gossip has been one of the more reliable pleasures of the last two decades. Each album a different temperature. Each one a controlled demolition of whoever she was before.
Her birth name is Yumiko—Shiina Yumiko, ordinary enough—and the distance she’s traveled from that to the artist called Ringo feels intentional, a shedding of skin that happened in public and in slow motion. The persona is total. She isn’t transgressive for the sake of shock, she doesn’t pursue Western crossover on Western terms, and she doesn’t do anything that could be described as audience service. She makes what she makes, and the rest of us adjust.
Gate of Living is the new video, and it arrives like a key finally entering a lock that’s been waiting for years. It threads through a private mythology she’s been building across albums and singles—through God, Nor Buddha, Le Moment?, The Narrow Way—narratives and images scattered without quite resolving, until now. Watching it, I had the feeling you get when a long novel’s final chapter recontextualizes everything you thought you understood about the chapters before it. She’s always been cinematic, always thought in images as much as in sound, but something about Gate of Living feels like an arrival rather than just another release.
Her new album is called Sandokushi. I haven’t stopped playing it. Twenty years in, and she’s still moving faster than I can follow.