Make Believe Melodies For February 10, 2025
All Albums Edition
AprilBlue — yura
There’s a tendency to bless Japanese music of all sorts with a kind of alien quality when in reality it both resembles and owes a lot to sounds from all over the world. “Genre = Unfazed Face; Japanese Genre = Excited Face.” Chalk it up to a listener’s fascination with the unknown-to-them, or flex that undergraduate degree by bringing up “Orientalism.” However you approach it, there’s a trapping to see anything Japanese as different.
It’s ultimately unfair to the art, though, because at its core is something that’s achingly familiar to anyone rather than some alien feeling. That comes to me every time I listen to yura, the second album from Tokyo’s AprilBlue. It’s an early 2025 highlight because it uses things familiar — both on a sonic and emotional level — to craft a collection immediate and melancholy, easy to feel regardless you understand the words or not.
The members of AprilBlue hail from outfits dabbling in a variety of rock crannies — shoegaze, indie-pop, twee, however you’d like to pin the eclectic stylings of Azusa Suga’s For Tracy Hyde. What works wonders on yura is how they avoid leaning into one corner too much. Feedback gives extra energy to cuts like “Hiraite” (above) and “Kotonoha No Kuni,” but rather than settle into a shoegaze swirl vocalist Haruki Funasoko cuts through it, making the melancholy clear. Other moments lean closer to the indie-pop bounce of Suga’s previous acts, using bells and driving melodies to get the feelings across, anchored by catchy choruses. Across yura, the band avoids settling for the familiar in favor of seeing just what they can do, centering the heart at its core. No need to see this as different — it’s just a certain strain of rock done very well and achingly, relateable to all. Listen above.
Kaede Hirata — Itsuka Ai Ni Natte Yuku
The world Kaede Hirata crafts on Itsuka Ai Ni Natte Yuku manages to be intimate and explosive all at once. The singer-songwriter draws the listener in close with her vocals — sometimes near whispers, other times sailing above, elsewhere glitching out on itself — but the music burbling around her refuses to be so stable. Dreamy electronic passages get bombarded by synth explosions, while skippy dance-pop runs trip over themselves and turn loopy. It’s all in service for the longing at the core of this album, captured both by Hirata’s lyrics and the way the music refuses to ever settle down, always racing and mutating. Listen above.
Creepy Nuts — LEGION
Despite accidentally finding themselves as one of the more prominent Japanese artists on the world stage, Creepy Nuts are impossible to pin down. At its core it’s a rap duo that was elevated into a J-pop position allowing them the ability to create themes for super-popular anime series…but, owing to the unpredictability of the modern music ecosystem, now exist as many folk’s first exposure to Japanese hip-hop. A pair with no desires to go abroad have no been flown out all around the globe, and become representatives of their country. It must be…so weird.
LEGION, the newest full-length from the two, largely shines because it shows how deep they’ve dug into the dance-adjacent sounds of global hip-hop, whether from Jersey Club (all the huge 2024 hits) to techno (“doppelgänger”) to drift phonk (“Chxxai”). It’s one of the best sounding J-pop albums in recent years, because of its eagerness to mess around with an array of genres, while injecting the pair’s own goofy energy. What makes it fascinating is the self awareness racing through it. New numbers find them dwelling on their unexpected fame (mentioning the places they went in 2024 on the opening number) and, in a particularly clever moment, the disorienting feeling of having to represent their home on the world stage (“japanese,” both funny and poignant). LEGION is the hit sound of the 2020s…and the experience of what comes after it lands. Listen above.
Yuri Urano — New Earth
At some points a few years back, the artist formerly known as Yullippe took a turn towards the ambient, shifting from constricting club sounds to field recordings. New Earth folds those samples of the natural world into electronic passages, creating a slowly unfolding set where the natural world meets one made by humans to show harmony. Get it here, or listen above.
Various Artists — Crystal Dispersion
I’m not a winter person per se, but I can be coaxed towards the coldest time of the year. Snow rules, and I love hot foods that make the temperatures a little more tolerable. I also like seasonal offerings like Snow Miku, the Hokkaido-only promotion turning the avatar for Vocaloid into a local ambassador for all things freezing. Fitting for a character representing artistic expression, Snow Miku also births compilations like Crystal Dispersion, which finds a variety of producers creating winter-appropriate numbers using her voice. It isn’t always so chilly — a lot of inclusions are just straight up dance-pop delights, fitting for any time of the year — but the best, like “Snow Drop” and “-4°C,” manage to capture the iciness of this period within its synth-pop fun. Listen above.
CLW — Kokyuu
Three of the four songs on Tokyo band CLW’s Kokyuu are good to very good — I like the way the beat skitters ahead on the title track before they let the keyboard melody come in, and the energy of the closing track gets a jolt via the lead singer’s rolled delivery. Yet what makes this a must listen is centerpiece “9608,” where they drop any superfluous details in favor of just letting the guitar chug and pained singing deliver an emotional body-check to listeners. Listen above.
indigo la End — MOLTING AND DANCING
Not to jump ahead of other anniversaries deserving attention but…we are agonizingly close to the ten-year mark of Enon Kawatani having an affair with Becky, and altering the course of Japanese entertainment history forever. Every element of it is fascinating to look back on…I guess hold tight until 2026…but I do always return to the weird place Kawatani has in the J-pop landscape. In the immediate wake of all this, he turned into the country’s musical jackass king, using his myriad projects to create songs of self loathing and rage at the media sphere that tripped him up. He absolutely did lose position over this — Gesu No Kiwami Otome. was on the verge of being the biggest band in Japan before the scandal broke — yet at the same time he’s wallowed his way through it all and largely come out fine.
Which is to say…here’s a new indigo le End album, slightly miserable but largely a chance for Kawatani to flex his sonic diversity. At some point post controversy, all of his projects started blurring together. I mean this in a good way — rather than do separate things via different names, Kawatani uses the freedom afforded by him being kind a shithead to do whatever he wants under whichever moniker he prefers. MOLTING AND DANCING finds him using his original rock-centric setup to explore a variety of jittery melodies and more mellow thoughts, with a sprinkling of unexpected touches (the strings of “Ramune” and “Yanagi” are particularly jarring).
The rub? He’s too good at all of this, with this one being another enjoyable set of rock that can’t sit still, from a guy you want to punch in the face but have to begrudgingly give artistic props to every time. Listen above.
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Oricon Trail For The Week Of January 27, 2025 To February 02, 2025
Back in the day, the Oricon Music Charts were the go-to path to music stardom in Japan. Acts of all sorts traversed these lands, trying to sell as many CDs as possible in order to land a good ranking on a chart choosing to only count physical sales, even as the Internet came to be and the number of versions offered for sale got ridiculous. Today, with the country finally in on digital, these roads are more barren and only looked at by the most fanatic of supporters needing something to celebrate. Yet every week, a new song sells enough plastic to take the top spot. So let’s take a trip down…the Oricon Trail.
Hinatazaka46 — “Sotsugyo Shashin Dake Ga Shitteru” (428,133 Copies Sold)
I’m not validating a sakura song in early February when the temperature outside is points away from zero. I don’t even think students have taken their entrance exams yet, save the mono no aware for March 1!
News And Views
Japan’s attention might be focused on the Fuji TV scandal…still playing out, still causing anger, still resulting in the stalwart Sazae-san having zero sponsors…but the last, last big reckoning still continues to shake out in its own way. Last week, SMILE-UP — the post-Johnny’s company focused on dealing with compensating victims of Johnny Kitagawa’s decades-long sexual abuse — sued victims who rejected the company’s current offers. I won’t pretend to understand the legal element to all of this, but it’s definitely one of those “optics look extremely bad” moves.
There’s not a ton of new developments with the Fuji TV situation, but one tabloid shared a report about former SMAP member Masahiro Nakai, who kicked this all off thanks to allegations of sexual abuse. This is a pretty shaky piece coming from an unnamed “insider,” but it does include the wild claim that most of his current savings are in crypto currency and he’s planning to flee to Singapore. Not exactly top-notch journalism, but who knows what’s going on.
ASOBISYSTEM doesn’t want you taking photos and videos of its performers.
Since I made this week’s edition all focused on albums / EPs, I can’t talk about the debut song from HANA, the group coming out of CHANMINA’s No No Girls reality competition. “Drop” is already getting a lot of attention…and I say good, because this is a way better fusion of rap and pop than, well, anything taking cues from BLACKPINK. The hip-hop actually comes first!
Speaking of what I don’t like in female pop projects…one of the groups I’m firmly a hater of is XG, both for overall grating music and the whole “X-pop” schtick. I bring this up because I actually don’t want the next sentence to come off as faint praise or sarcastic…the group recently were selected to appear in a space-themed ad for McDonald’s Japan (or…some sort of livestream platform? Who knows), and I think it is legitimately the coolest they’ve looked (largely because they are actually having fun for once rather than being oh-so-serious) and it comes with a song that sounds good too. Bless the fast-food chains for doing miracle work. Oh also they’ll play Mexico and Brazil.
Want to know how I know kawaii idol groups are back? So many people want to see CUTIE STREET that it becomes a safety problem.
While lots of exciting developments are playing out when it comes to Japanese music in the west, some of the most intriguing happenings remain in Asia. There’s a new event called CENTRAL coming to Taipei and Kuala Lampur this April, showcasing three J-pop acts each.
New disc guide coming soon about ‘90s eight-centimeter CD single releases.
I’ve been absolutely slammed with work over the past month…note to freelancers, sometimes you should say “no” to offers, though also good luck killing the nagging voice in your head saying “they’ll never work with you now, fool!”…which has resulted in like three half-completed drafts just sitting around in my newsletter. One of those is about Watashi Wo Ski Ni Tsuretette!, the Bubble-era skiing movie that is a fascinating document of this glitzy time. “It’s really cold out right now, this would be perfect!”
In a great bit of timing and perhaps motivation to finish this up (this week? But I also got one on VTubers….), Toyota shared a special video inspired by the film and featuring a Yuming cut from the flick. All of it is very throwback, while also adding in touches apt for today (running from “look a snowboard” to “that person is eating popcorn, how absurd”).
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
Check out the Best Of 2025 Spotify Playlist here!
My little niece LOVES XG and recently switched from being a BlackPink fan to being an XG fan. So they definitely have the elementary school girl demographic on lock.