Make Believe Mailer #144: Anymal Magnetism

Revisiting The Album That Kinda Derailed Suchmos

For a window in the late 2010s, Suchmos appeared to be the future of Japanese music.

The viral success of 2016’s “Stay Tune” looks slight nearly a decade on — J-pop was still so allergic to YouTube at the start of that year that a video getting like, 30 million views felt like a sea change — but it spread to more traditional platforms. Here was a Kanagawa-based band capturing the mood of millennials in the country as they settled into adulthood. It was cool both in sound (aligning with “neo-city-pop” despite the band itself drawing from Jamiroquai and acid jazz) and in attitude (a laid-back positivity despite it all, about hanging out and making the most of youth).

“I'm inspired by people like David Bowie, John Lennon and Joe Strummer," lead singer Yosuke “Yonce” Kasai told me during Suchmos’ peak back in 2017, shortly after the release of commercial and critical hit The Kids. "I think I'm especially inspired by them because they wrote about their daily life, but it ended up echoing with lots of other people. I think they really worked closely with the times they were in."

Suchmos were capturing the 2010s vibe, but the project was built for the long term. They established their own label, and in a 2017 interview with Cinra the group’s manager gets into the nitty gritty of how they hoped to become a fixture for decades to come.

A few years after these dizzying highs, the band announced a hiatus that lasted until the start of 2025. In about a week, Suchmos makes its proper return with a show at Yokohama Arena, alongside a new EP and a bunch of festival dates this summer. It’s a big development, but plays out at a time where the musical landscape completely changed. Suchmos, at this moment, almost feel like a throwback, to the point where nostalgia-dealers Tokimeki Records close out new collection Tokimeki Disco with a glitzy take on “Stay Tune,” including it on an album mostly made up of ‘80s covers meant to make you go “remember that?”

Suchmos’ moment past, and while it’s totally possible this return can push them back into the spotlight, the energy of the late 2010s they crystallized is gone.

So…what went wrong?

There’s all kinds of cool threads to pull at to unravel this one. It’s probably a case of too-much-too-fast, with the band’s big success around The Kids resulting in moves that on paper probably looked good but resulted in pretty quick backlash. The biggest is one I’ve touched on before, when Suchmos created the theme song to NHK’s coverage of the 2018 World Cup. That’s fine, though getting too close to the national broadcaster could come off as kinda lame (the interview I did with Kasai, linked above, was actually in the NHK offices).

The blunder, though, was having Suchmos do a live performance of the number during halftime of the Japan-Colombia match. Turns out soccer fans want soccer during a soccer broadcast, not stabs at classic rock. It’s one of the few times I remember seeing instant unanimous backlash against something on Twitter, and probably turned off more potential listeners than brought them in.

All kinds of challenges related to sudden success also hampered them, as interviews from around this time reveal a band that was tired. Complicating matters was the health of bass player HSU, whose condition resulted in several postponements, while other factors appeared to result in the cancellation of a whole Asia tour.

Still, Suchmos had its supporters and sold out Yokohama Stadium a year later, a dream gig for the outfit. By 2021 though they wrote that they needed to take a break. Soon after the announcement, HSU died at the age of 32.

As tends to be the case, it’s a series of decisions they made and happenings out of the band’s control that lead to this hiatus. Yet if we choose to be a little simplistic about it, one could easily point to a specific moment for Suchmos signalling the end for them.

That would be 2019’s The Anymal, among the wildest swerves in Japanese music history…but one true to its creators.

The entire draw of Suchmos in the mid 2010s came from authenticity. The group sang about the world around them, with Kasai saying frequently in interview that everything embedded within was all real. “No lies,” is what he told me¹. Couple this with an on-trend embrace of funk synthesizing both The Return Of The Space Cowboy and Random Access Memories, and you had hits ideal for the times.

The Anymal² carries on that ethos, with Suchmos authentically expressing how much they hated what they became. The ‘90s groove and ‘80s sparkle got put away in favor of classic rock riffs, blues slow-burners and progressive flirtations. That’s what the members themselves had gotten deep into in the wake of The Kids, which was classic rock, blues and progressive tunes.

This pivot started taking shape on previous EP The Ashtray, but that’s like Nishino Kana compared to The Anymal. The biggest shift on its third album wasn’t necessarily a sonic one, but a structural one. Suchmos let the songs stretch out and wander, with three numbers here going beyond eight minutes. At times it comes off like the band is navigating a large space, the music drifting smoke-like rather than driving ahead like on older releases. Kasai’s vocals, in particular, feel unrestrained from the form Suchmos’ work previously took. The advance single was “WATER,” a slowly unfolding number giving Kasai room to show his full range against what sounds like a jam session…and establish there’s no “Stay Tune” coming down this lane. This one didn’t even get a video, but rather a live performance of them doing it in a church, as blatant a signifier as “this is important” possible.

Suchmos embraced this newfound artistic freedom, and interviews with Kasai after the fact find him and everyone else proud they could create something as unpredictable as The Anymal. Yet that atmosphere also makes it sound frequently unwieldy. It’s an album capturing a band enthralled by the possibility of getting back to its rock roots and operating differently, but not being sure how to make anything out of this spirit. The longer the tracks here go, the more lost Suchmos become. “WATER” teases catharsis but feels too improvised to ever reach it, with Kasai filing the space with different vocal inflections (one of which sounds very Muppet-like). “Hit Me Thunder” is mournful but meandering. The longest of all, “Indigo Blues,” at least plays out as theatrical with actual arcs, but even then stretches of it feel rudderless.

It’s ambitious and challenging for sure, but ultimately just that. I wish that, six-ish years later, returning to this one revealed new depth, but I feel like simply echoing James Hadfield’s original review of it for The Japan Times. It’s great hearing a group that could have coasted off a lifetime of ROCK IN JAPAN appearances unspool itself to explore blues and rock burners, but it doesn’t coalesce into anything beyond that. Not helping is a cynical streak that turns the already dirge-like “In The Zoo” into a dour exercise in the human condition.

The Anymal could have been a sort of learning experience for Suchmos, and the best moments find them avoiding the psych-rock deep end in favor of playing around with shorter numbers. “ROLL CALL” warps the coastal grooves of its breakout days for a dubbier chug topped off by a hook that’s catchy but heavier than what they usually dealt in. “ROMA” imagined a Suchmos songs built from a very un-Suchmos sound palette (xylophones???), and despite its batshit name, “HERE COMES THE SIX-POINTER³” shows how true departures into new territory work if the group gave themselves about six minutes to experiment instead of nearly 12.

Japanese critics loved it at the time, some calling it a masterpiece in part for the same reasons I can’t fully gel with it — it’s ambitious, like nothing Suchmos had done before and exploratory. Yet what I think The Anymal really is above all else is…interesting.

J-pop in the 2010s featured a lot of works that I’d say are flawed but highly fascinating for whatever reason. Those could be thanks to left-field sonic choices (CAPSULE’s CAPS LOCK) or emotional rawness rarely seen from a superstar (Hikaru Utada’s Fantôme) or purely conceptual (idol group dotstokyo’s harsh noise album). Without getting too “the time they have-a changed” about it, works like this feel like last gasps of a musical ecosystem driven by CDs, where projects big and small could spend a release trying ideas out or working through things.

The Anymal absolutely falls into this category, and might be one of the best examples of it from that decade. It’s a lot like the mirror reflection of my ultimate peak for this type of 2010s full-length, Gesu No Kiwame Otome’s 2016 work Ryoseibai, best summed up as the most self-loathing J-pop release of the 21st century. Even without an affair scandal clouding it⁴, it’s a work finding lead vocalist Enon Kawatani seemingly hating every aspect of his life over extremely catchy pop-rock. It plus the media-grabbing problems he found himself in, resulted in Gesu — seen as the next big thing — receding. Ironically, “Stay Tune” came out just a couple weeks after, ushering in a new wave.

Suchmos tiptoe towards a similar nihilism at times on The Anymal — especially on the aforementioned “In The Zoo” — but ultimately the band’s not gritting its teeth at anything personal. Rather, this is an album capturing a group seemingly fed up with the sound that made them big, and working to get away from it. Rare is an album where you listen to a group that already achieved huge success try to plot a new path out right in front of you, but that’s The Anymal.

In a best case scenario, this would have been a truly transitional album, and whatever came next could have seen Suchmos learning from the sonic wilderness of its third full-length to truly transform into something new. Maybe they still will! What’s left for now, though, is a work of its time, doomed forever to be in 2019 amber.

I could theorize until the Substack system tells me to shut up about why Suchmos slipped, but what I always end up coming back to is the band just wasn’t going to work in 2020s of J-pop. Months after The Anymal, the true domestic sea change arrives with YOASOBI’s “Yoru Ni Kakeru.” I can’t think of a sonic and emotional shift further from what made Suchmos big — listeners went from “we want to hear about people navigating life and finding chill happiness” to “we want to hear about people throwing themselves off buildings.” Vocaloid became the foundation for the nation’s pop, and anime its biggest driver. I associate Suchmos much more with like, jeans and cigarettes.

Prior to reforming, the individual members kept busy, most notably with Kasai playing a prominent roll in the Mirage Collective project with STUTS and butaji before fronting the band Hedigans…which is actually as close as he’s come to something resembling the crunchier rock of The Anymal, albeit in bite-sized songs. Post hiatus, Suchmos have a new EP on the way with one song already out, above, which is fine. It’s definitely leaning into the older sound (the record scratches are back!), with a heavier shadow over it.

Maybe that’s the right move, as the same critical outlets that praised its third album have since completely ignored it when assessing the 2010s, elevating The Kids and “Stay Tune,” the latter being called the song of the decade. Nobody is making disco-fied takes on “WATER.”

The Anymal, though, does feel like a sign of an era coming to a close. Streaming and the internet was finally becoming central to how Japanese music traveled at home and abroad. In this ecosystem, a “long album” is something packed to the gills meant to be put on in the background to juice numbers, with very little thematic throughline.

The Anymal is long, but not in the mindless way something like Spotify rewards. It’s the last gasp of CD-style bloat, not concerned with streams but more about filling as much available space as possible and ideally elevating it. That’s what the members of Suchmos grew up with, even if it didn’t align with what brought them to the mainstream or where the world was going. They were just being authentic to themselves, after all.

Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Check out the Best Of 2025 Spotify Playlist here!

1. Worth noting that “VOLT-AGE,” the World Cup song, marked the first time Suchmos ever had to write about a theme or topic. A tough enough challenge for a young group, but even more so when it has to convey something that can be tied to a Peru vs. Denmark group game.

2. I’m choosing not to do it in all caps just because I think that will get annoying.

3. I did not listen to The Anymal once in the last three years…but I have most certainly thought about this song title, and wondered what sport would even be possible for such a scenario to happen. This a rugby thing?

4. Which of course is what the album itself probably turned out to be inspired by, though nobody knew that until it came out? Insane record.